How to Manage APPS on the Mac Mini with 256 GB SSD storage Only ?

[marcusalwayswins]

Hi Guys,

I wanted to know from all you guys. If someone has a mac Mini with only 256 GB SSD. And If I decide to keep all my documents, files etc on an external storage Do you guys think the Many APPS that I install on the Mac Mini will that be good enough to accommodate and have all my APPS on the Mac Mini ?

In short How many APPS can I have at an average on Mac Mini ? I know it depends on the APP and the space it uses but can someone give me an idea ?

I am planning to take the 256 GB SSD storage Mac Mini but am slightly worried that even though I can manage my Files and Documents and all other Things on external storage, will I be able to have all my APPS on the mac Mini ?

Plus I believe the OS and the external display also takes some space on the Mac Mini right ? I have an external Monitor, will that take any space ?

 

[Kebabselector]

The problem is not an easy thing to work out as it depends on the Apps. Lightroom is one of my most used apps and just the app takes up 4gb. Rather than putting that on an external drive I use the library on another volume. The built in photo's app points to the external drive as well. All my apps works out to about 32gb, my user folder has 83gb used so you can see where my problem is.

 

[TechRunner]

If you're asking this question, you should consider going with 512GB for your own peace of mind. Just my opinion...

 

[smirking]

Lightroom is one of my most used apps and just the app takes up 4gb. Rather than putting that on an external drive I use the library on another volume.

I'm a Capture One Pro user and I spent a summer managing a set of catalogs totaling 1TB on an external SSD drive. It was only a USB 3.1 speed drive so we're talking actual speeds of around 300MB/s. Capture One uses the catalogs as cache space too so this could have been a very bad idea. It turned out that it was fine. Whatever performance drop I incurred was not noticeable to me.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

If you don't have the Mini yet, you should be thinking 512gb or perhaps even 1tb for storage...

 

[ignatius345]

Plus I believe the OS and the external display also takes some space on the Mac Mini right ? I have an external Monitor, will that take any space ?

The OS takes space, yes. Plugging in a display does not cause any more disk space to be taken up.

 

[marcusalwayswins]

OP:

If you don't have the Mini yet, you should be thinking 512gb or perhaps even 1tb for storage...

Yes first timer buying Mini

 

[Ben J.]

I did this with a 2018 i7 mac mini 256GB. Took some work, but it worked. I managed to keep about half of the disk free space, which is good for SSDs, they shouldn't be filled up like HDs could be, SSDs will suffer speed and longevity with more than say 80% filled.

My procedure was simply to find out what was taking up space, and move folders to external storage, and making a symbolic link of the copied folder (an 'alias' but better) and placing the symlink where the original folder had been. Freeing up space on the startup disk.

The OS will use about 30GB.
The other main disk space users are the Applications folder and your Documents folder.
Also, many applications will install stuff in the main Library and Shared folders.

Applications should always be installed on your startup drive, and therefore they will reside in Applications.

MacOS and other elements expects to find a Documents folder, so I wouldn't move the whole Documents folder, instead I'd find select stuff inside it that I could move. (I don't think anything would break if you did the alias thing w/Doc folder, but I didn't try it.)

The main things I moved to external drive was:
Photo library, movies, music, music creation stuff like sample libraries, and older stuff 'in storage'.

My main utilities in this scenario are:
DaisyDisk, small app to quickly find what's taking up space on your drive.
and 'Create symbolic link' in Services in Finder menu.

Good luck, this is quite doable.

PS: In case you don't know, the internal ssds in new macs are extremely fast. And the larger, the faster - and most of all; they can't be upgraded later. So if you have the money, it's a good investment.

A 'SSD' doesn't mean 'fast'. Your external SSD might be new and look good, but it might have a read/write speed of 1-2 or 3 hundred MB/s. My internal drive is around 3000MB/s. It means a lot to the general feeling of 'snappiness' of the mac. So, first of all, make sure you have the best you can afford. Blackmagic disk speed test is free, and lets you easily check r/w speeds.

 

[Ben J.]

You know what, come to think of it, I actually did this with a Mini on Catalina with only 128GB internal drive. This was prior to doing it with 256, but it taught me how to make it work.

 

[meson]

I run my mini as you propose. OS and Apps are installed locally. The majority of my files live in cloud storage. I don't use my downloaded media files nearly as much as I used to, so they are on an external HDD with the default apps pointed to that location for when it is plugged in. The Mini has the default applications installed by Apple, but I removed Garage Band. Some of the heavier apps I've added include the MS Office apps (~7GB without Outlook or OneNote), Mathematica (6.71GB), Xcode (23.3GB), MacTeX (~5GB or so), VMware Fusion (1.44GB) (VMs on external SSD), and a smattering of smaller utilities that I use. I currently have 159.58GB free.

After being spoiled by the ability to have 2 drives in my non-retina 2012 MBP, I learned how to manage storage on a work issued 2014 MBP with only 128GB of storage. Things like Google Drive and OneDrive make data management so much easier these days.

As long as you are judicious about how you use your space, you will be just fine.

 

[CausticPuppy]

The problem is not an easy thing to work out as it depends on the Apps. Lightroom is one of my most used apps and just the app takes up 4gb. Rather than putting that on an external drive I use the library on another volume. The built in photo's app points to the external drive as well. All my apps works out to about 32gb, my user folder has 83gb used so you can see where my problem is.

I have an M1 w/256GB internal (and 2TB external SSD), and manage all my content on the external drive.

My apps take up 38GB, which is fine. My biggest issue is the "system data" which is consuming 65.82GB of space! And no visibility into what that is or how to clean it up, though I did free up a few GB using the free version of CleanMyMac.