Good way to live with Mac with modest boot drive

[elasticmedia]

I am thinking of upgrading my beloved trash can to a Mini M or a Studio. My 1 tb trashcan is about half full, and I can easily manage my files that way. Looking at the used Mini/Studio market, the 500 gb models are way cheaper and more numerous, so I am thinking of how to live with a smallish boot drive. What are the best practices to boot up on a 500 gb drive while large files automatically get deposited on the external drive. I don't know if that is possible - perhaps the reality is that you are continuously managing the load on the boot drive and dragging files over to the external drive.

I also have the sense that transfer to an external drive from the boot drive, even if both are SSD, is going to be a much slower process than the SSD drive soldered directly to the main bus of the main logic board. Is there some methods that makes the transfer as fast as possible, based on the right kind of SSD drive/SSD enclosure/cable type? If I were to get a matching hub under the mini that would hold another drive or 2 and have some other ports, I might be willing to consider a 500 gb drive model

thanks,
Jim

 

[rm5]

To me, this question is hard to answer because it's dependent on so many things that I don't know. Therefore, it just comes down to a personal choice. You should figure out how you work best and base your file management off that—not some obscure suggestion from me or someone else.

Yes, external SSDs are generally going to be slower than the crazy fast internal drives of Apple Silicon Macs. But they won't be so slow that you can't work with them.

What I would recommend is to store applications and important files you access often on the internal drive. For me, this totals no more than about 100 GB. Then, my active projects go on a 1 TB external SSD, and when the project's done, it gets archived to a larger spinning drive. That's how I work. It's pretty simple and doesn't involve much prior setup.

In retrospect, I have almost nothing (compared to some people) on the internal SSDs of all my devices. I prefer to store things externally so I can use the files on many devices without having to make copies or store them in the cloud (yes, some files do get stored in the cloud, but not many). Music and video projects? External SSD, and then archival disk. Photos from my iPhone? When I reach about 100 photos, I'll drop 'em on my external drive and delete them off my phone. Probably the vast majority of those are so unimportant that I don't need them anyway. Large files I download from the web? External drive. Virtual machines (in the rare case I need to use one)? External drive. Documents and music scores are stored in the cloud because they're small files that are easy to work with. You get my point (I hope).

I honestly don't know how to answer your question further, it's simply a personal choice how you manage your stuff. My advice might work, but I also don't know the type of work you do or how important the internal drive actually is for you.

I hope this helps a bit though.

 

[gilby101]

Is there some methods that makes the transfer as fast as possible, based on the right kind of SSD drive/SSD enclosure/cable type?

Fastest is fast SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure. Lots of choice. Can be almost as fast as the internal - if you are prepared to pay for it. But any SSD with 3.x USB connection will be fast enough for most activity.

 

[Fishrrman]

What follows is my opinion only.

DON'T try moving from a larger drive to a smaller one.
Stick with "at least the same size".

Otherwise, you're going to regret it.
You're going to be unhappy.

(like I said, my opinion only)