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Thunderbolt external drive
- Thread starter timtapio
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Use the boot drive as scratch. Move competed photos to external drives to free up boot disk space. For max performance, change to SSD and have 16GB of memory. External drives can be FW800, USB 3, or thunderbolt. Be sure to have a large external drive for Time Machine backups.
I don't know what's your budget, but this is a pretty good solution for the price:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...uctGroup=external&m.tsConnections=thunderbolt
It's not cheap, but 256GB of SSD through Thunderbolt is quite a nice external scratch disk.
Your Mac doesn't have USB 3.0 so otherwise you could get a USB 2.0 external hard drive for really cheap but performance will be considerably worse than the LaCie Thunderbolt SSD I pointed out (155 MB/s vs 30 MB/s).
Another solution would be to use a second internal drive in your optibay. It's more convenient, as long as you don't mind losing your optical drive.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H...uctGroup=external&m.tsConnections=thunderbolt
It's not cheap, but 256GB of SSD through Thunderbolt is quite a nice external scratch disk.
Your Mac doesn't have USB 3.0 so otherwise you could get a USB 2.0 external hard drive for really cheap but performance will be considerably worse than the LaCie Thunderbolt SSD I pointed out (155 MB/s vs 30 MB/s).
Another solution would be to use a second internal drive in your optibay. It's more convenient, as long as you don't mind losing your optical drive.
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256GB Samsung 840 Pro ($269.99 on sale on Newegg) + Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter ($99.99) + Thunderbolt cable ($49.00) = $418.98.
Definitely not cheaper, plus that GoFlex adapter is a bit slower and it's going to be super fragile since it will simply be an internal drive with no enclosure. No USB 2.0/3.0 support as well when you want to connect to PCs.
Unless you have major issues with using the boot drive as scratch, there is quite little you can do without going into surgery mode. Admittedly, using a TB drive as scratch might be an option, but not exactly hassle-free.
Are you using the machine desktop-like or do you work on the road a lot?
Would you want/need the added snappiness of an SSD? If so, replacing the SuperDrive with the HDD (and the HDD with an SSD in turn) might be a good option.
RGDS,