Let’s talk about external storage

[hajime]

Prior to Silicon Mac, I used to have 1TB in all the Intel MacBook Pro I owned. Half assigned to macOS and half assigned to Windows. When using the latest Intel Mac, I told myself to get an Internal 2TB in the next purchase.

Then Silicon Mac came out. It is expensive to upgrade to an internal SSD to 2TB. When MacMini M4 came out, most recommended upgrading the RAM rather than SSD since the RAM cannot be added. I can imagine that it could be OK to do that on a desktop machine but for laptop, it may be inconvenient to carry an external drive all the time. Also, the situation has changed since prices for SSD have doubled in recent months making it more expensive and impractical to get an external 2-4TB drive or NAS. I might be able to repurpose spared 1TB SSD drive if needed. I also have a spare slower 6TB hard drive which could be repurposed.

I only run one Windows VM at a time. Initial tests showed that at least for now, 16GB RAM is sufficient. Don’t know about the near future. Most likely I will trade-in for a higher specs redesign model when it is released. So the Air is for a few months use but if Apple screws up the redesign, I may continue to use this M5 Air for a few years.

What is the best way to do if I get a new M5 Air? Is it better to upgrade to 1TB even the trade in value for such upgrade might be zero? Again half for MacOS and half for Windows VM.

 

[Ben J.]

I would ask myself; what data would I really like to be on high speed storage. I really need the 40Gbit/s speed of internal or external NVMe for photo editing/catalogue, music mixing/creation with large sample libraries so thing load fast.

It might be that you really only need those kinds of speeds for macOS, apps, and the win side of things, and that you can fit it on a 512 internal drive. My 512 internal drive has more than 50% free space, because I moved a few folders to a slower external drive because they were large and not in need of speed.

I can also recommend dual enclosures like this Acasis, if you have two or more SATA 2.5" SSDs. Those old drives are 3-400MB/s but they're still quite capable, and the enclosures are cheap. Plus with a dual enclosure, you use up only one port. Good for backups.

For a portable, no external drive mac, the amount of data that you need to have on high speeds decides the size of the internal drive.

Daisydisk is cool for quickly seeing what's taking up space on your drives.

Disabling Time Machine and snapshots is the first thing to do to free up space on the internal.

 

[hajime]

Thank you. So I need to do some housekeeping.

Is it better to have two separate external drives one for MacOS and the other for Windows VM?

I bought an OWC 1m2 TB5 enclosure on BF but the cost of the Samsung 4TB NVMe SSD was not as low as that in 2024. Waited until Christmas to see if there was a drop in price but unfortunately prices have been skyrocketing since then.