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Melodeath

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 9, 2009
580
48
With the small sizes of internal SSDs (assuming you don't go Fusion), clearly we are expected to utilize external drives with our desktops and laptops these days for storage. My question is about workflow.

I work with audio, and when I put the audio on my external drives, my projects are initially very slow to Read from the drive. When I use the internal drive (even though it's an HDD, not SSD), it's instant. And I have 750GB of space! I know all kinds of people are editing photos and video on their iMacs. If you work with photos on your iMac, do you keep them stored an an external while you are working on them, or do you transfer them to the internal SSD, edit, and then transfer back to the external for storing? It seems like a lot of moving around/file maintenance.

I'm on a 2010 MBP (probably upgrading to a 5k iMac) and with my current external HDDs, I've noticed quite a lag in spin-up when I go to access the drives. I know the problem is spin-up, not the fact that I'm still using USB 2 because I can hear the drive revving itself up from silence. How do you avoid this lag? Is it the hard drive itself that determines when it stops spinning? It seems silly to have these unbelievably quick CPUs and SSDs and interfaces (TB2, USB 3), but the space is so limited that we're forced to use these external drives that are really quite slow.

Obviously external SSD would fix this issue, but then once again, you're dealing with lack of space for the price. I feel like there's something I'm missing. I thought we'd all be using 2TB internal SSDs by now :p

Thanks for your answers
 
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