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Flash Storage - How to deal with reduced SSD space?

50voltphantom

50voltphantom

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 23, 2011
177
0
With flash storage being standard on the new MBP's and Air's, how do you deal with the standard 128 or 256GB of flash storage native on your laptop when it comes to large media libraries and backing those librairies up?

I LOVE the Time Machine backup utility but to my knowledge, you can't use it to back up more than one drive, or an one drive to another external drive. I am considering replacing my aging iMac with a notebook, but I NEED 1 TB of storage and a standard MBP is out of the question. Can someone enlighten me?
 
50voltphantom said:
With flash storage being standard on the new MBP's and Air's, how do you deal with the standard 128 or 256GB of flash storage native on your laptop when it comes to large media libraries and backing those librairies up?

I LOVE the Time Machine backup utility but to my knowledge, you can't use it to back up more than one drive, or an one drive to another external drive. I am considering replacing my aging iMac with a notebook, but I NEED 1 TB of storage and a standard MBP is out of the question. Can someone enlighten me?
Click to expand...

Why is cMBP out of the question? They are still great machines and user upgradable.
 
Carry around a small 2.5 inch external harddrive?
When I swapped out the existing 500GB drive in my Macbook Pro to a 256GB SSD, I used it as an external drive. I still have 100GB on my drive with my virtual machines and lightroom catalogs.

The thing eating space before I switched was my music collection, over 100GB. I now use a program called 'TuneSpan' which allows me to store the majority of my music on my file server. I only keep my 'favorites' playlist on there which saves a huge chunk of space!
 
Easy, I keep my music on the internal flash drive. Keep the movie collection mostly on an external drive I carry around in my laptop bag.
 
I'm not one for keeping my files on an external so when I first bought a 2.3/16/256 Retina I had to return it due to the immediate lack of space. I ended up getting a 2.7/16/512 and had no more issues...with storage.

Why is a standard MBP out of the question? After having several cMBP's and then going to the Retina model, I had no issue returning to the cMBP. I have a 512GB SSD in my 17" and a 256GB SSD in my 13", and I'm going to give the Fusion Drive hack a shot once I get my second-HDD kit in.

If you NEED that much storage, you'll just have to save up for an rMBP with 768GB SSD and then get an external to make up for the rest I guess.
 
I just replaced the drive in my MBP with a Momentus XT 750gb hybrid.

13 second boot time from power button press. Performance is great.

I run a pure SSD machine at work and this thing isn't drastically slower in general use. I mean it's never going to be exactly as fast, but it is no longer annoying after working with SSD all day.

For 150 bucks, I highly recommend this drive.


I considered a roll-your-own fusion drive setup, but with the SATA3+optibay issues, decided against it.

I'm happy with my set up.
 
I've moved everything I can to online services. Got rid of my music, now use spotify. Thrown all my movies onto an external 2TB, easily accessed if I need it. Moved all my email into a gmail account and leave it on googles servers.
Pretty easy really, went from a 17inch MBP with 1TB drive to 11 inch air in one fowl swoop! Biggest thing on my drives is virtual machines which I unfortunately have to have!
 
Irock619 said:
Why is cMBP out of the question? They are still great machines and user upgradable.
Click to expand...

The cMBP is out of the question because in less than 3 years, I see the HDD being completely obsolete for consumer computers, so I don't see the point in buying a new machine without an SSD.
 
50voltphantom said:
The cMBP is out of the question because in less than 3 years, I see the HDD being completely obsolete for consumer computers, so I don't see the point in buying a new machine without an SSD.
Click to expand...

That's quite a gamble you're makin - un-necessarily.

The other way of looking at it is this:

In 3 years time, if history is anything to go by, the size of applications and data will have doubled or more. A standard MBP gives you options - there are SSDs available in the 2.5" form factor, hybrid drives, and regular spinning disks.

For the cost of 128gb of SSD, i just bought 750gb of hybrid, and its performance in general use is comparable.

Every person I know who has gone SSD only (even a friend who pimped out his MBP retina with 768gb) is feeling storage pressure.


If you're hell bent on going SSD and still need 1tb of space, you're simply going to need to pay a lot for it, or deal with the fact you'll need to rely on external drives or a NAS. Or buy less SSD now and wait for the price to come down then upgrade it.
 
50voltphantom said:
The cMBP is out of the question because in less than 3 years, I see the HDD being completely obsolete for consumer computers, so I don't see the point in buying a new machine without an SSD.
Click to expand...

User upgradeable is the key word here.

You can pop in SSD inside yourself and make it a screaming machine... I took the original Apple Hitachi 500GB out and replaced it with 256GB Samsung SSD, the Superdrive is going out too in the next week and will be replaced with 512GB Crucial m4 SSD, for a total of 768GB internal SSD storage on the cMBP. Those two SSDs cost me only $490 together, I only wonder how much would Apple ask for such upgrade:D

So, in your case just pop in 2 512GB SSDs, if you are lucky and can score the recent sale on Newegg of the new Samsung 840 500GB SSDs, it's gonna set you back only $600-$640 and you'll have your 1TB in SSD form in cMBP;)

I will put the internal DVD drive into an OWC external Superdrive USB case, just in case I need it which I rarely do.

This config should easily last keep me happy for the next few years;) If you don't need the portability of MBAir or retina display of rMBP, I'd definitely consider cMBP, just for its easy upgradability of RAM and SSD.
 
50voltphantom said:
The cMBP is out of the question because in less than 3 years, I see the HDD being completely obsolete for consumer computers, so I don't see the point in buying a new machine without an SSD.
Click to expand...

Nothing is stopping you from buying a cMBP and installing a SSD in it. Upgradeability! Now there is something that may be going away in the next 3 years.
 
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