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sshewa1

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 26, 2011
17
0
I have the 256gbssd MacBook retina pro. Im a graduate student so didn't have the $$ to spend on the extra hd space. I don't do any photo editing or sound editing. I was thinking of buying a 128gb sdcard and just leavin my photos and iTunes library on it. Both of them together are at about 90-100gb. My question is has anyone done this? Is 45mb/s transfer rate of the sdcard good enough to store the music library on the card and not have problems while iTunes accesses the library to play music etc..?
 
I have the 256gbssd MacBook retina pro. Im a graduate student so didn't have the $$ to spend on the extra hd space. I don't do any photo editing or sound editing. I was thinking of buying a 128gb sdcard and just leavin my photos and iTunes library on it. Both of them together are at about 90-100gb. My question is has anyone done this? Is 45mb/s transfer rate of the sdcard good enough to store the music library on the card and not have problems while iTunes accesses the library to play music etc..?

i think they have class 10 extreme SD cards with 120gb storage but honestly at that price just upgrade your ssd will be doing the same thing. the samsung 840 is on sale right now
 
RE: SD cards...

Hi sshewa1,

Two comments: Firstly, 45 MB/s is fast enough to stream your iTunes Library, but I would question whether you actually will get 45 MB/s in practice. Secondly, some SD cards are notorious for having connection problems, they disconnect at apparent random times and for no obvious reasons. If you are just streaming music and photos off the SD card, it probably does not matter if it occasionally disconnects, but you might want to look into which cards have the fewest connection problems before purchasing.

Regards,
Switon
 
Last edited:
Also keep in mind that when you put in the card, it will stick out a little bit from the side of the computer. It doesn't go completely into the computer.
 
This might be of interest: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342319572/the-nifty-minidrive

And yes, 45 MB/s (MB = MegaByte, Mb = Megabit, 1 Byte = 8 bit), and even 45 Mb/S (5.625 MB/s) would be more than enough to play back compressed stereo music (16 to 40 KB/s), uncompressed stereo music (86 KB/s to 563 KB/s) and compressed HD video (normally less than 1 MB/s, sometimes up to 2 MB/s) and even editable HD video (ProRes HQ).

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i think they have class 10 extreme SD cards with 120gb storage but honestly at that price just upgrade your ssd will be doing the same thing. the samsung 840 is on sale right now

A MacBook Pro with Retina Display will not take standard 2.5" S-ATA SSDs, as it has its own SSD in its own form factor.

aurapro6genvoypro_gall3.jpg
 
I don't think this solution is quite ready for prime time yet. I was considering doing the same thing (but running a Windows partition off of it).

Th flush mount solution (Nifty Mini-Drive), isn't shipping yet, and when (and if) it does ship will limit you to a micro-SD card which currently max out at 64GB and slower transfer speeds.

If you don't mind the card sticking out a bit, I think you can get 128GB cards that are even faster than 45MB/s, possibly up to 5400rpm drive speeds, but they're still pretty expensive (though cheaper than the 512GB upgrade ripoff from Apple).

SDXC can theoretically support up to 2TB of space, so maybe in a year or two we'll see 256GB microSD cards that run at 50MB/s+, but not yet.


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