Upgrading to 16'' M1 Pro from 2013 - storage concerns

[saqer]

Upgrading my wife's 2013 Macbook Pro to the 16''. A few years ago i upgraded the storage on her 2013 MBP to a 2TB SSD. I cannot for the life of me understand Apple's decision to prevent upgrades and the configuration options are cost prohibitive. She uses it for serious photo editing, and is currently utilizing 1.6 TB of space (primarily raw images). We also have 2 TB of iCloud storage that's nearly maxed out (combination of iOS photos and raw photo files from her DSLR).

We have external hard drives that would more that accommodate but we're not sure how that would work with connectivity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to effectively manage with the 1TB config on the 16'' M1 Pro? Would it require being constantly tethered to an external hard drive? We're open to a process change, just not sure of best practices.

 

[venom600]

The PR answer is that the SOC requires the drive to be integrated to achieve maximum performance. The reality is that you can achieve substantially the same performance with a high speed PCI Gen 4 SSD in an M.2 slot. The real reason is that they don't want you to upgrade. They have spent the last decade making sure that nothing on these notebooks can be upgraded with unnecessarily proprietary SSDs, and then with T2 machines, proprietary SSDs either soldered on or locked to the T2 chip that cant be upgraded.

The solution to your problem is the SD card slot. Get a high speed 1TB MicroSD card and put it in a half size adapter like a niftydrive. Not sure which ones mount flush with these, but I'm sure there are some coming that are designed for these machines.

 

[Wando64]

Upgrading my wife's 2013 Macbook Pro to the 16''. A few years ago i upgraded the storage on her 2013 MBP to a 2TB SSD. I cannot for the life of me understand Apple's decision to prevent upgrades and the configuration options are cost prohibitive. She uses it for serious photo editing, and is currently utilizing 1.6 TB of space (primarily raw images). We also have 2 TB of iCloud storage that's nearly maxed out (combination of iOS photos and raw photo files from her DSLR).

We have external hard drives that would more that accommodate but we're not sure how that would work with connectivity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to effectively manage with the 1TB config on the 16'' M1 Pro? Would it require being constantly tethered to an external hard drive? We're open to a process change, just not sure of best practices.

This is what I do with my music projects.

It is unlikely that your wife will need constant access to 1.6TB of photograph.
There will be a small number of projects she’s currently working on and a large number of projects that are essentially archived most of the time.
The current projects should sit on the internal SSD whereas the archived ones can safely be stored on an external SSD until she needs to use them again.
How easy this will be to manage will depend on the software she’s using and whether it can allow libraries to be split between SSD/HDs or allow to easily work with multiple libraries.
The only problem I can see with this approach is that some cloud solutions only allow synchronisation from one SSD/HD only.
I am not sure whether iCloud Drive works this way or whether you can synch from two separate SSDs.

 

[saqer]

Yeah, the solution was staring me straight in the face - I completely overlooked the SDXC slot. I'm now weighing the option of just biting the bullet and gong for $400 upgrade to the 2TB internal HD or a ~$150 investment in a high quality 1TB microSD. If she's moving data over from the camera can she move them directly to the SD card? Are there any other things to be aware of using an SD card in that fashion? Thank you.

 

[jayling7]

I'm not sure I'd trust the SD slot on these new macbooks for any photographic work as there's a lot of problems being associated with it right now. Here's one of the threads: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/14-and-16-m1-pro-sd-card-slot-problems.2320399/

Personally, I'd either go with an external fast SSD drive or opt for the higher priced internal, that's if it's possible in your budget. Good luck and great filming to her.

 

[stefanski]

I cannot for the life of me understand Apple's decision to prevent upgrades and the configuration options are cost prohibitive.

Are they really though?

To upgrade from 1TB to 2TB is $400.

An SD card at Wallmart is $230 for 1TB for something that will deliver up to 160MB/sec read and 90MB/sec write.

So with that you'd save $170 vs going 2TB with Apple and you will be less than impressed with the performance.

Is this really worth it?

Alternative:
I have a super fast Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVM drive with 1TB capacity which amounted to $300 including the case. It's so fast there's no real life difference between internal vs external on my M1 MBA.

But again, is this really worth it vs just going 2TB and fork out 400 bucks for what is ultimately the best and easiest config to have? If your wife is doing "serious" photo editing then time wasted waiting for images to load/save should also be a consideration, no?

Using your existing external drives will mean you need a dongle of sort to hook up to a MBP of this day and age. Also means your drives probably aren't that fast if they were connected to a 2013 Laptop unless they are Thunderbolt 2. It just all becomes a bit of a hassle. Not to mention the whole backup issue to the cloud if half your images are stored internally and the other half sits on an external drive.

Sometimes what looks expensive at first glance may not actually be that much once you consider all alternatives?

If you're concerned that the 2TB will not be enough because you're already at 1.6 as it is then yes, it becomes very expensive to go Apple and I would suggest you go down the external Thunderbolt M.2 NVM route.

 

[saqer]

If you're concerned that the 2TB will not be enough because you're already at 1.6 as it is then yes, it becomes very expensive to go Apple and I would suggest you go down the external Thunderbolt M.2 NVM route.

She's going through space very quickly and it won't be sustainable. So, 2TB is actually within realm of affordable but she would be well beyond that next year. I think we need to focus on ways of archiving her data more regularly.

 

[Jl006p]

Upgrading my wife's 2013 Macbook Pro to the 16''. A few years ago i upgraded the storage on her 2013 MBP to a 2TB SSD. I cannot for the life of me understand Apple's decision to prevent upgrades and the configuration options are cost prohibitive. She uses it for serious photo editing, and is currently utilizing 1.6 TB of space (primarily raw images). We also have 2 TB of iCloud storage that's nearly maxed out (combination of iOS photos and raw photo files from her DSLR).

We have external hard drives that would more that accommodate but we're not sure how that would work with connectivity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to effectively manage with the 1TB config on the 16'' M1 Pro? Would it require being constantly tethered to an external hard drive? We're open to a process change, just not sure of best practices.

Ante up and pay the $400.

Like my boy Aldo once said, Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten.


I import all my raw footage directly into my Mac. I hate having things dangle on the side of my MacBook cos I'm always on the go and it's also not as fast as the built in storage on these new babies.

Case and point here. Built in SSD on my 14"

I just bought a Samsung T7 SSD and look at this

and it's suppose to be USB 3.2 1000 mbps read/write.




My usual work flow is this

1. import raw footage into Lightroom cc
2. pick out my best shots
3. move rejected photos into trash and delete
4. edit
5. Lightroom will start uploading those photos to the cloud. Once they're all up there I delete them locally to free up space.

Trust me the last thing you want to deal with is insufficient space.

 

[wilberforce]

Yeah, the solution was staring me straight in the face - I completely overlooked the SDXC slot. I'm now weighing the option of just biting the bullet and gong for $400 upgrade to the 2TB internal HD or a ~$150 investment in a high quality 1TB microSD. If she's moving data over from the camera can she move them directly to the SD card? Are there any other things to be aware of using an SD card in that fashion? Thank you.

I also do a lot of photoediting. I would be very leery of using a microSD card as a working drive. SD cards have limited write cycles, and using it as a working drive incurs hundreds more write cycles than just recording photos/videos in a camera. I have had failures of SD cards and/or corrupted files, especially MicroSD cards, even the "endurance" ones sold by Samsung (which have slower write/read speeds btw). Also, microSD is slow, about the same as a spinning hard drive.
If you go this route, I suggest have frequent backups and replace the card every year or two.
I just have to offload older photos/videos to external drives - have about 20TB.
Lightroom can catalog over multiple drives, and you can use smart previews to have access to all photos while an external drive is disconnected.
btw, I got 2TB for my main machine (iMac). About the most I wanted to spend for internal SSD, and reduces the aggravation. (My previous iMac was 1TB, and was a nuisance managing it all the time). But I still have to have external drives

 

[saqer]

Thanks all. After collecting more details from my wife, it sounds like she's just hoarding source image files which is unnecessary. the 1TB will do and, we have an 8TB external in case she needs more space to work with.