Greetings,
I've retired my Mac Pro 3,1. And now the time has come to retire my Mac Pro 4,1 (flashed to 5,1). Doh. But behold, I'm getting a Mac mini 2018 (i7). Yay. Grabbing minimum amount of RAM so I can max it out much cheaper by myself. I'm also getting an eGPU. Meanwhile I'm probably making myself more confused than I ought to over how to set up the incoming MM 2018.
On the Mac Pros I've always had macOS on an internal drive and Windows (via Bootcamp) on another internal drive, instead of just partitioning one drive. It always felt better to keep them on separate physical disks. But the MM 2018 holds only one internal drive.
My initial plan was to get 1 TB or 2 TB of internal storage, and partition this in half - for macOS and Windows, with enough space for their programs and then some extra wiggle room (perhaps also for a small Linux partition). Everything else on externals (one external for macOS and one for Windows).
This is where I hope you can tell me about your experiences:
1. Should I simply partition the internal drive on the Mini (I'll go for either 1 TB or 2 TB capacity)?
2. Or should I keep only macOS on the internal, and place Windows on an external?
3. Or the other way around - Windows on the internal and macOS on an external?
4. Or: keep both OSes on separate external drives (leaving the internal drive untouched - in which case the minimum capacity 256 GB option would make sense instead of the 512 GB / 1 TB / 2 TB options)?
Now for the second part of the post: I mostly use Windows for gaming (occasionally some audio and video editing). Game library is huge. On the macOS side of things I do a lot of photo work, and some video and audio editing. And a decent amount of gaming. Very decently sized gaming library there too. All this has been easy to setup on the Mac Pros. But with the MM 2018 I will have to make more use of external storage, as the maximum 2 TB internal storage capacity is nowhere near what I need.
So I'm getting two Leidian-X4 TB3 NVMe cases from Jeyi (several users here have good experiences with these). I'll populate each of them with a 2 TB Samsung EVO 970 Plus (I was briefly thinking about the Intel 660p, which is half the price, but performance is not quite on level with the 970).
This will still not provide me with enough space, though, so I might have to re-use the 4 1 TB SSDs that are currently sitting in the 4,1, as external storage (faster than spinning drives, slower than the two drives that I will hook up).
Extra external storage is available on my 8-drive NAS (tons of photo storage, but I also keep my iTunes stuff there, which I might have to look into once I get the MM 2018 and Catalina, since iTunes is no longer a thing).
Backup routines are taken good care of - CCC on an external USB drive (and another backup of the CCC backup on a separate drive), cloud storage, and Time Machine (TM was on an internal 4 TB hard drive in the 4,1) will reside on an external USB drive (or I'll put the TM drive in the NAS - I think that is doable).
And when going from the Mac Pro to the MM 2018: Would it be better to start from scratch (clean install) and just manually copy over whatever I would need, instead of using the Setup Assistant/Migration Assistant to carry over almost eleven years of settings made under numerous previous OSes and potential system conflicts? The last time I did a clean install was when I went from a 2006 iMac to the 2008 Mac Pro...
Maybe there are options I have not thought of, or maybe some of my own options would not work as good as I think. Thus, thanks for any input!
I've retired my Mac Pro 3,1. And now the time has come to retire my Mac Pro 4,1 (flashed to 5,1). Doh. But behold, I'm getting a Mac mini 2018 (i7). Yay. Grabbing minimum amount of RAM so I can max it out much cheaper by myself. I'm also getting an eGPU. Meanwhile I'm probably making myself more confused than I ought to over how to set up the incoming MM 2018.
On the Mac Pros I've always had macOS on an internal drive and Windows (via Bootcamp) on another internal drive, instead of just partitioning one drive. It always felt better to keep them on separate physical disks. But the MM 2018 holds only one internal drive.
My initial plan was to get 1 TB or 2 TB of internal storage, and partition this in half - for macOS and Windows, with enough space for their programs and then some extra wiggle room (perhaps also for a small Linux partition). Everything else on externals (one external for macOS and one for Windows).
This is where I hope you can tell me about your experiences:
1. Should I simply partition the internal drive on the Mini (I'll go for either 1 TB or 2 TB capacity)?
2. Or should I keep only macOS on the internal, and place Windows on an external?
3. Or the other way around - Windows on the internal and macOS on an external?
4. Or: keep both OSes on separate external drives (leaving the internal drive untouched - in which case the minimum capacity 256 GB option would make sense instead of the 512 GB / 1 TB / 2 TB options)?
Now for the second part of the post: I mostly use Windows for gaming (occasionally some audio and video editing). Game library is huge. On the macOS side of things I do a lot of photo work, and some video and audio editing. And a decent amount of gaming. Very decently sized gaming library there too. All this has been easy to setup on the Mac Pros. But with the MM 2018 I will have to make more use of external storage, as the maximum 2 TB internal storage capacity is nowhere near what I need.
So I'm getting two Leidian-X4 TB3 NVMe cases from Jeyi (several users here have good experiences with these). I'll populate each of them with a 2 TB Samsung EVO 970 Plus (I was briefly thinking about the Intel 660p, which is half the price, but performance is not quite on level with the 970).
This will still not provide me with enough space, though, so I might have to re-use the 4 1 TB SSDs that are currently sitting in the 4,1, as external storage (faster than spinning drives, slower than the two drives that I will hook up).
Extra external storage is available on my 8-drive NAS (tons of photo storage, but I also keep my iTunes stuff there, which I might have to look into once I get the MM 2018 and Catalina, since iTunes is no longer a thing).
Backup routines are taken good care of - CCC on an external USB drive (and another backup of the CCC backup on a separate drive), cloud storage, and Time Machine (TM was on an internal 4 TB hard drive in the 4,1) will reside on an external USB drive (or I'll put the TM drive in the NAS - I think that is doable).
And when going from the Mac Pro to the MM 2018: Would it be better to start from scratch (clean install) and just manually copy over whatever I would need, instead of using the Setup Assistant/Migration Assistant to carry over almost eleven years of settings made under numerous previous OSes and potential system conflicts? The last time I did a clean install was when I went from a 2006 iMac to the 2008 Mac Pro...
Maybe there are options I have not thought of, or maybe some of my own options would not work as good as I think. Thus, thanks for any input!
