SSD Supplementation

[jh4n688]

For those of you who are planning to buy a MacBook with a SSD that will likely be too small for your total data storage needs, what will you be using externally to provide the rest of your storage space? I ask because I would prefer to get only a 256GB SDD in order to save money, but I anticipate that within about 1.5-2 years I will need more like half a terabyte of data space in total.

Does something like this http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412666,00.asp approximate what many of you will be getting? If I were to buy this and plug it into my laptop via Thunderbolt, is it going to be basically as fast as the internal SSD? Does the decision to use external storage also depend greatly on the nature of what's being stored?

 

[revalationist]

For those of you who are planning to buy a MacBook with a SSD that will likely be too small for your total data storage needs, what will you be using externally to provide the rest of your storage space? I ask because I would prefer to get only a 256GB SDD in order to save money, but I anticipate that within about 1.5-2 years I will need more like half a terabyte of data space in total.

Does something like this http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2412666,00.asp approximate what many of you will be getting? If I were to buy this and plug it into my laptop via Thunderbolt, is it going to be basically as fast as the internal SSD? Does the decision to use external storage also depend greatly on the nature of what's being stored?

no, it will not be as fast really.

 

[Dalton63841]

I have a 12TB debian linux home server that anything that requires actual space goes on.

 

[spronkey]

You won't get anything as fast as the internal SSD, unless you replace it with a larger, internal SSD.

Your only option there is likely to be OWC - and I'm not the biggest fan of their SSDs.

Having said that, a lot of the stuff you store on your mac doesn't actually need the PCIe SSD speed.

For example, photos, music, basic documents, movies etc are just fine on a fast SD card. Sandisk's 128GB extreme adds only a tiny profile to the edge of your computer, but is more than fast enough for storing those kinds of files.

 

[jh4n688]

Thanks for the responses.

Are there any external drives out there that could approximate the transfer speed of an internal 7200RPM HDD and hold 1TB?