How to expand to external storage on a Mac Studio

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Level 1

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How to expand to external storage on a Mac Studio

My last MacBook Pro had 4 TB of storage. It and my iMac 3TB hybrid are both dying, and with no 27" iMacs now, I am leaning toward a Mac Studio, but I cannot afford the hefty price tag of that much internal storage. What are the options for an external SSD and how do you make assignments/designations? I have over 50,000 pictures in Photos and not sure how much music is stored on my computer due to my slow and unreliable rural Internet, so I suspect they would need to be stored in the primary internal SSD. How do I best meet my needs and can they then all be backed up to a single backup drive?

Posted on Aug 17, 2022 8:33 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

tbirdvet

Level 6

16,427 points

Aug 18, 2022 5:45 AM in response to VLMaples

You can use an external ssd. I have a Thunderbolt External drive and keep my movie folder on that drive. All I did was moved from internal drive to external ssd. I saved 89gb of space. You can do the same with Photos etc.

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Answer 2

Aug 18, 2022 6:45 AM in response to VLMaples

<< I suspect they would need to be stored in the primary internal SSD. >>

Only system files need to be stored on the boot drive. EVERYTHING in your User folder and anything else can be stored on an External drive of any description.

and if you want to bad enough, you can use an external drive as a boot drive.

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Answer 3

Aug 23, 2022 12:20 PM in response to WayneJStewart

Newest SSD drives on the market are claiming one drive at 7,000 Mbytes/sec.

So RAID is no longer a requirement.

Thunderbolt connection is the bottleneck that limits you to just around 2,700 M bytes/sec, so don't pay extra for claims of faster.

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Answer 4

VLMaples Author

Level 1

10 points

Aug 23, 2022 1:09 PM in response to WayneJStewart

Forgive me, I have been away from new tech for quite some time; what is NVMe? Thanks for the important clarification. Sticker shock has me seriously considering going an opposite direction with a large, maxed-out iPad Pro and an external monitor with New advances in the OS, but I want to consider all my options.

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Answer 5

Aug 23, 2022 1:45 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

The problem is that all the 7,000 Mbytes/sec are NVMe and NVMe

drives are more expensive than 2.5” SSDs and not available in larger sizes.

If you want faster 8 or 16tb then RAID is about the only

choice.

Most 40Gbps NVMe enclosures have pretty decent heat sinks

but it varies. I like Orico but there’s a lot of choices out there.

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Answer 6

Aug 18, 2022 9:15 AM in response to VLMaples

I connected my new Mac Studio to a Thunderbolt3 OWC with 4 SSD enclosed and I get in RAID 0 to 1000-1200 MB/SEC (write-read). I'd recommend you have a look to Th3 SSD devices