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File Hording Issues

heisenberg123

heisenberg123

macrumors 603
Original poster
Oct 31, 2010
6,498
9
Hamilton, Ontario
I am sure I am not alone, but I have this issue where I like to keep all my movies and TV shows on my MBP, I have about 650GB worth of files.

I like many others would love to upgrade to a SSD but 1TB SSDs are still a bit pricey


The reason I like my movies on my laptop is so it can be my Plex Library, I have Plex built into my smart TV.

what have others done to upgrade to a smaller SSD but still have access to the files without having to connect to a USB external drive.
 
heisenberg123 said:
I am sure I am not alone, but I have this issue where I like to keep all my movies and TV shows on my MBP, I have about 650GB worth of files.

I like many others would love to upgrade to a SSD but 1TB SSDs are still a bit pricey


The reason I like my movies on my laptop is so it can be my Plex Library, I have Plex built into my smart TV.

what have others done to upgrade to a smaller SSD but still have access to the files without having to connect to a USB external drive.
Click to expand...

You could get an optibay and replace your cd drive with your old hard drive and put an relatively small SSD in you macbook and use it as OS hard drive. Then you can just keep your files on your old one.
 
heisenberg123 said:
I am sure I am not alone, but I have this issue where I like to keep all my movies and TV shows on my MBP, I have about 650GB worth of files.

I like many others would love to upgrade to a SSD but 1TB SSDs are still a bit pricey


The reason I like my movies on my laptop is so it can be my Plex Library, I have Plex built into my smart TV.

what have others done to upgrade to a smaller SSD but still have access to the files without having to connect to a USB external drive.
Click to expand...

What's wrong with using an external drive? I keep my movie/TV collection on a few drives, some internal and some external. I run Plex on a Mac mini and have zero problems with that arrangement.
 
GGJstudios said:
What's wrong with using an external drive? I keep my movie/TV collection on a few drives, some internal and some external. I run Plex on a Mac mini and have zero problems with that arrangement.
Click to expand...


not that there is anything wrong with it, its nice to not have to move the MBP back to my desk and plug in my external everytime I decide I want to watch a movie but there are worse things in life I guess

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fenjen said:
You could get an optibay and replace your cd drive with your old hard drive and put an relatively small SSD in you macbook and use it as OS hard drive. Then you can just keep your files on your old one.
Click to expand...



I like this idea, I still use my optical drive a few times a year is there a kit to convert my curent optical drive to an external one or do I just buy an external optical drive
 
heisenberg123 said:
not that there is anything wrong with it, its nice to not have to move the MBP back to my desk and plug in my external everytime I decide I want to watch a movie but there are worse things in life I guess
Click to expand...
Do you have another computer you could connect the external drive to? The movies in your Plex library can reside on multiple drives on your Wi-Fi network. For example, I have some movies on the Mac mini's internal drive, some on my MacBook Pro's internal drive and some on external drives. The drives don't have to be directly connected, as long as they're shared on your Wi-Fi network. A NAS would be a good solution for this purpose. You could keep your favorite movies on the MBP internal drive, so they're available when you travel, and keep the rest on other drives on your network.
 
GGJstudios said:
Do you have another computer you could connect the external drive to? The movies in your Plex library can reside on multiple drives on your Wi-Fi network. For example, I have some movies on the Mac mini's internal drive, some on my MacBook Pro's internal drive and some on external drives. The drives don't have to be directly connected, as long as they're shared on your Wi-Fi network. A NAS would be a good solution for this purpose. You could keep your favorite movies on the MBP internal drive, so they're available when you travel, and keep the rest on other drives on your network.
Click to expand...

no second computer, are NAS drives wireless or do the need to be ethernet connected to the router?
 
NAS drives can be connected to your WiFi router. Work like a charm for storing your Media collection and some support being used as a Time Machine.

The Synology NAS's are recommended. I just got a DS214play designed for transcoding 1080p video.
 
I have my series on the Time Capsule. If I want to watch them, I just do it over network.
 
leman said:
I have my series on the Time Capsule. If I want to watch them, I just do it over network.
Click to expand...

A time capsule is a good way to go for this. As much as I'm in favor of huge storage on laptops, I use a time capsule as a home media server - it works really well.
 
heisenberg123 said:
not that there is anything wrong with it, its nice to not have to move the MBP back to my desk and plug in my external everytime I decide I want to watch a movie but there are worse things in life I guess

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I like this idea, I still use my optical drive a few times a year is there a kit to convert my curent optical drive to an external one or do I just buy an external optical drive
Click to expand...
Yes there is a kit for this! Google it.
Its amazing to see people still use CDs. I havent done this in like 10 years.
 
Meister said:
Yes there is a kit for this! Google it.
Its amazing to see people still use CDs. I havent done this in like 10 years.
Click to expand...

As far as I know the only reason Apple has continued to ship MBPs with optical drives is because of the popularity of optibay converters. There's no other reason for an optical drive.
 
Definitely look at a Synology NAS box, they are really great. Some of them can run a Plex server too.
 
simon48 said:
Definitely look at a Synology NAS box, they are really great. Some of them can run a Plex server too.
Click to expand...

If you are going to drop the coin on a Synology NAS box you might as well just get a Mac Mini which will be 100x more efficient in Plex Server transcoding.
 
ThisIsNotMe said:
If you are going to drop the coin on a Synology NAS box you might as well just get a Mac Mini which will be 100x more efficient in Plex Server transcoding.
Click to expand...

But a Mini isn't a NAS box with RAID.

I've never used Plex myself, but I thought if you encode your videos correctly (well done H.264) Plex didn't need to do any transcoding.
 
heisenberg123 said:
not that there is anything wrong with it, its nice to not have to move the MBP back to my desk and plug in my external everytime I decide I want to watch a movie but there are worse things in life I guess

----------





I like this idea, I still use my optical drive a few times a year is there a kit to convert my curent optical drive to an external one or do I just buy an external optical drive
Click to expand...

You could just buy a cable for like 15 dollars so you can connect the cd drive trough usb. You could also buy an enclosure on ebay. I'm not so sure on the price and quality of those, but basically it will look an Apple super drive, which is pretty neat imo.
 
fenjen said:
Yeah absolutely.
One thing to note however is that there has been reports of difference in quality of the optibays (cheaper ones being, supposedly, worse), but I'm not really sure about that. You might wanna look into that though.
But anyway, looks neat, right? :)
Click to expand...

The bay itself is just a piece of formed metal. The caddy is the one you want to check the quality on.
 
I had all the same concerns. Ultimately, a cheap caddy and a cheap optical drive enclosure worked just as good as one could hope. They just work and I never think of them. There is no need to buy the "premium" ones.

On the other hand, file hoarding is a curable disease. I'm not quitting cold turkey, but I'm trimming my HDD contents every now and then, when I stumble upon a file and realize I will probably never care to open it. :) Sometimes letting go is a good thing ;)
 
disasterdrone said:
The bay itself is just a piece of formed metal. The caddy is the one you want to check the quality on.
Click to expand...

Yeah I was talking about the caddy. It's often called an optibay. I wouldn't call the other thing a "bay" rather an enclosure.
 
themumu said:
I had all the same concerns. Ultimately, a cheap caddy and a cheap optical drive enclosure worked just as good as one could hope. They just work and I never think of them. There is no need to buy the "premium" ones.

On the other hand, file hoarding is a curable disease. I'm not quitting cold turkey, but I'm trimming my HDD contents every now and then, when I stumble upon a file and realize I will probably never care to open it. :) Sometimes letting go is a good thing ;)
Click to expand...



haha thanks for the confidence in beating this, so you think the combo I post from ebay would be fine?
 
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