Moving from iMac to MacBook Pro—SSD question

[4k78]

Okay after years of desktops I decided to get a 16” MBP. More importantly my wife has approved the purchase.

My iMac has a 3tb Fusion drive. And has about 2tb filled. Maybe less. I might be able to cull some user accounts though.

My photos are important and have over 30000 plus 4K videos. The 4tb model is pretty pricey. Wondering if an external hard drive would work well with some unused files such as old podcasts? Or go for the 4tb drive and not worry about filling it up?

Thanks.

 

[ultrakyo]

Another option is to save your $1,000 for 2TB iCloud Service or dropbox. I have over 80K photos and videos over iCloud.

 

[ilikewhey]

just get a 2tb ssd for 200 bucks, i moved my photo library to external drive, which is the single biggest item on my mac. no need to pay 10 bucks a month for cloud subscription if you don't need constant access on the move.

 

[Clix Pix]

Do you already have everything backed up as well? With photos and other important files it is pretty essential to have them backed up somewhere other than just on one's main drive.

Aside from that, yes, putting the photos files on an external drive will get them out of the way and take up much less space on your new SSD. I shoot a lot of photos -- pretty nearly every day, actually -- and I do not keep them on my 2018 MBP's internal SSD; instead I keep them on external SSDs, both in-progress files and backed-up files.

 

[ilikewhey]

and my external ssd which contains samsung nvme writes up 1k mb/s faster than internal.

 

[4k78]

I have my photos and music backed up but it’s been a while. I just rechecked my hd. I’m using about 1.3tb. I do want to keep my photos on the computer and offload podcasts and a couple of user accounts I had set up for my wife and my siblings. Leaning toward the 2tb now.

Any suggestions on external SSDs?

 

[Marc Feldesman]

if you want speed and reliability, get an external Thunderbolt 3 (not USB-C 3.2) with NVMe Non-volatile memory blades. A bit more expensive, but you will never take a speed hit. Check with OWC for good deals. They carry their own brand as well as G-Drive, Samsung, and LaCie. Keeping photos archived on an internal SSD of a laptop is a prescription for disaster. They will fill your SSD rapidly, attach lots of dinky xmp files, and when the SSD fails, or your computer crashes, or your computer gets stolen, you might not have what you need backed up. When I travel and photograph (I’ve got 200,000 photos in my recently culled LR catalog), I carry two very small 2 TB Thunderbolt 3 SSDs. Photos are ingested directly to catalogs in parallel on both drives and are edited and backed up from the main externalSSD to number 2 SSD. In addition, cards do not get reused in the field. Each hard drive gets carried in a different bag, including checked luggage, while the cards stay in my camera bag, which rides with me. When I get home, the ingested images get copied to a RAID array merging with my primary catalog, that gets backed up to a NAS on a completely different level of my house, and everything goes to a Backblaze Cloud account. Once that is done, all the cards get reformatted and are ready for another shoot. This all gets done automatically the moment the #1 SSD is plugged into my desktop and everything runs overnight while I’m sleeping.

 

[Fishrrman]

Buy TWO (not 1, but 2) external drives of sufficient capacity.

MOVE your large libraries (photos, music, movies) to the first external drive.
You can keep your favorites, but get "the bulky stuff" onto external storage.

Then... use a cloning app such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to clone the contents of the first external drive to the SECOND external drive.

Now you're protected, because storing the files in one location is never enough.

To this day, I'm amazed at the number of folks who will pay through the nose for enormous amounts of SSD drive space, and then... keep it filled with stuff they'll probably never access again...

 

[Clix Pix]

As far as brand recommendations: Samsung! I have the X5 (thunderbolt 3) and T5s and T7s..... I also have a few G-Drive Mobile SSDs as well. I do something similar to what Marc Feldesman describes above: when I travel I carry along a couple of T-5s and use those for backing up anything I shoot, and also keep the files on the memory cards until after I have returned home, as well as sometimes also putting them on the computer if I want to just quickly review them. I rarely process while on a trip, but do like to at least see what I've shot.

I keep a full set of external SSDs with backed-up files and archived files in my safe deposit box at the bank, as well as at home, and each month I swap out the drives with newly updated ones and bring home the ones that have been in the bank for updating. Well....I HAD been doing this until COVID-19 interrupted things! Now it is possible to make an appointment at the bank and have access to my safe deposit box, and I am intending to do just that at the beginning of September. The drives in the safe deposit box now have been in there since March -- whew, it'll be good to get updated ones in there and to bring those others home for much-needed updating!

There is usually no real reason to keep every photo you ever shot right there on a computer's internal hard drive -- much safer to keep them on a couple of external drives where they can be protected from loss, theft or damage. On the computer I keep just whatever I'm working on at the moment, plus a folder of favorites that I sync with my iPad and iPhone, and a few other favorites. With my external drives, if I suddenly have the need or desire to look at or share a particular image, it's easy enough to plug in the drive, pull up the image and do whatever it is that I had in mind. If I plan to share it, I copy it to the internal drive, leaving it in place on the external drive, put away the external drive and then share the image with friends or on a forum.