Using External Drive for Media on new M3 iMac

[djduran]

Hi -

Feeling very lost in the world of USB standards, transfer speeds, and practical implications on performance.

Short Q is simply: Is it reasonable to run my media library (photos and videos) via an external drive connected to a new M3 iMac? And if so, what do I need to watch out for in terms of ports, cables, drives, etc to ensure performance is sufficient?

Longer story: I'm currently on a 2017 iMac 3.4 GHz Intel i5. I upgraded it substantially in 2020 with 32GB Ram and a 1TB internal SSD, but my 1.3TB photo library (and growing) is stored on a 4TB External HDD. Feeling like the M3 iMac w/ 10 core GPU (and more ports) would be a nice step up, but hoping running the right external drive will be sufficient without having to configure it to 2TB w/ Apple (and even then that is probably space constrained).

Anyway, any help appreciated.

 

[Bigwaff]

Your 4TB external USB HDD should be compatible with M3 iMac. You might need a USB-C adapter depending on the USB cable you are using.

 

[djduran]

Your 4TB external USB HDD should be compatible with M3 iMac. You might need a USB-C adapter depending on the USB cable you are using.

Thanks. I guess what I’m wanting to confirm though is am I loosing performance by going this route vs all internal SSD?

I’m not sure the internal IO speed vs over USB, and the latter seems to vary heavily by port, cable, and drive.

 

[chabig]

Performance will be more than sufficient for photos and video.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Photos & Videos (and music) are NOT big throughput hogs. Even old 5400rpm HDDs could easily serve it up fast enough to watch without stutters. In general, it's a great idea to store (especially) video on an external drive vs. allocating big space on the relatively precious amount of space you have internally. I have about 30TB stored on a few HDD-based RAID drives serving multiple AppleTVs and iDevices in my household. No problems at all.

1.3TB for a personal photos library? If so, that sounds like a LOT of duplicate photos that may need pruned. People love to take 10-50 rapid fire shots in hopes of getting the one perfect one and then end up just dumping all in the Photos library instead of trashing all but that perfect shot. If that's you, you might want to prune the imperfects. 1.3TB is HUGE (unless, perhaps you are storing videos in there too).

You can also split photos out into their own (smaller) libraries, then load the library that contains the types of photos you want to view. For example, I know someone who basically used photography like a document scanner. So along with actual photos were all these documents they shot too. It was relatively easy to create a Documents photo library to store all of the "scans" in one library and then have the other library only holding their actual photos. This chopped one huge library into 2 smaller ones. And it was obvious which library to load based on whatever they wanted to see: documents library for documents, photos library for photos.

If perhaps you are a pro photographer: instead of storing all of your shoots in one gigantic library, you could have libraries for each client, project or perhaps a library for each year or even each quarter. Then, just keep some good notes about where the collection of photos you want to locate are stored.

If you have a bunch of video in your Photos library, that would be easy to eject out to a videos folder to significantly thin your photos library. On an external drive, you could then set the TV app to leave the files on the external but otherwise index and organize them for you in the TV app (done by unchecking just one box in the TV app settings). Then IT- the TV app- becomes your video file manager. Net effect in this split: much smaller photos library and separate videos library... the latter managed by the TV app.

If you think about the analogy of how families stored traditional print photos, they never had one massive album holding all photos. Instead they had many albums holding collections of photos by event or, more typically, by year(s) in a chronology of how long it took to fill up an album before starting another. Digital photo libraries could be like that too, where you split the huge library into smaller more manageable ones. Then just load the library for the span or time or category of photos you want to review now.

 

[ChuckJC]

Your 4TB external USB HDD should be compatible with M3 iMac. You might need a USB-C adapter depending on the USB cable you are using.

I was also using a 2017 27" iMac Pro. I connected my Promise Pegasus R4 with the provided Thunderbolt cable and the Apple Adapter Thunderbolt to USB C. It worked fine. After purchasing my 14" MacBook Pro with M3 Pro Chip, the drive isn't showing up. I had no idea that would happen since I had the Apple cord adapter. My Maxtor 3200 had stopped working with one of the Mac OS updates a few years ago and now this. Drives me crazy.

 

[Bigwaff]

I was also using a 2017 27" iMac Pro. I connected my Promise Pegasus R4 with the provided Thunderbolt cable and the Apple Adapter Thunderbolt to USB C. It worked fine. After purchasing my 14" MacBook Pro with M3 Pro Chip, the drive isn't showing up.

Did you install updated M-series drivers for your Pegasus unit?