My mac mini 2Tb internal drive is nearly full. I need an external drive to move all the photo files that are currently in my Pictures folder (i.e. not my Photos) which I access with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Do I need to get a Thunderbolt 5/USB C drive or will something with a slower connection suffice?
Mac mini, macOS 15.6
MacGuy1951 wrote:
My mac mini 2Tb internal drive is nearly full. I need an external drive to move all the photo files that are currently in my Pictures folder (i.e. not my Photos) which I access with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Do I need to get a Thunderbolt 5/USB C drive or will something with a slower connection suffice?
You do not need a drive with a Thunderbolt interface, any more than you need a Formula 1 race car to drive to the supermarket or to take a trip on InterState highways.
Although portable, bus-powered mechanical hard drives can be useful for backup, you probably would want your main external drive to be either
Mechanical desktop hard drives are available in very large capacities (up to about 22 – 24 TB) and have a low cost per byte. But they are large, can be noisy, and aren't the best place to keep the Lightroom catalog and cache files (as opposed to full-size photo files).
When it comes to USB 3.* SSDs, USB 3.1 Gen 2 / NVMe SSDs aren't much more expensive than USB 3 / SATA ones. Some of them are also pretty small. The one which I have attached to my desktop Mac is about the size of a credit card, whereas USB 3 / SATA drives tend to be about the size of two decks of playing cards.
MacGuy1951 wrote:
My mac mini 2Tb internal drive is nearly full. I need an external drive to move all the photo files that are currently in my Pictures folder (i.e. not my Photos) which I access with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Do I need to get a Thunderbolt 5/USB C drive or will something with a slower connection suffice?
You do not need a drive with a Thunderbolt interface, any more than you need a Formula 1 race car to drive to the supermarket or to take a trip on InterState highways.
Although portable, bus-powered mechanical hard drives can be useful for backup, you probably would want your main external drive to be either
Mechanical desktop hard drives are available in very large capacities (up to about 22 – 24 TB) and have a low cost per byte. But they are large, can be noisy, and aren't the best place to keep the Lightroom catalog and cache files (as opposed to full-size photo files).
When it comes to USB 3.* SSDs, USB 3.1 Gen 2 / NVMe SSDs aren't much more expensive than USB 3 / SATA ones. Some of them are also pretty small. The one which I have attached to my desktop Mac is about the size of a credit card, whereas USB 3 / SATA drives tend to be about the size of two decks of playing cards.
VikingOSX wrote:
I use Crucial X9 SSD on all my Macs for Time Machine backups (including on my own M4 Mac Mini Pro). Crucial is now showing the X9 as end of life, though from my experience, an excellent drive. Available in 1, 2, and 4 TB capacities. It is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gb/s) drive that comes formatted as exFAT and with a comparable USB-C cable.
I have a couple of Crucial X9 Pros – one that I use for extra storage, one for backup. These also are "PC" drives that came formatted with exFAT. (I reformatted them to APFS.). I did read somewhere that if you intend on using one of these as an external startup, you should get the "for Mac" version that comes reformatted with APFS; the reason being that the "PC" drives might need a firmware update to act as Mac startup drives; a firmware update that you need a Windows PC to install.
On the Crucial site, it is these Crucial X9 Pros (whether for Macs or for PCs) that are marked "End of Life". The plain Crucial X9 drives do not have that marking.
The Crucial X10 is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (2x2, 20Gbps) drive that I have not purchased since the USB-C ports on my Macs are not 2x2, and I have no knowledge if the drive and its higher-performance USB-C cable would be compatible. It does come in 1, 2, 4, 6, and even 8 TB capacities.
The Mac and the drive should negotiate the highest USB speed which both have in common.
This would typically be USB 3.1 Gen 2 speed ("up to 10 Gbps") if you plugged the drive into a USB-C host port; USB 3.0 speed ("up to 5 Gbps") if you plugged it into a USB-A host port with an adapter. (USB-A ports can be designed to run at up to 10 Gbps, but I don't believe that any of Apple's USB-A ports are.)
FWIW, for archival storage of photos, pretty much any external drive will do (actually 2, one for backup as any drive can suddenly fail). I have several USB based external SSDs that contain all my photos (and backups of them) and only keep work in progress and the current and last month on internal drive. I have been partial to Samsung T7s for their small size so offline storing them takes up very little space. Most SSDs are small as well but I like the shape factor of the T7 as it fits nicely into a storage box that I have.
Yes, you can use external HDD drives for archival storage and they don't have to be attached and running all the time if you are concerned with noise since they are archival, you likely don't need daily access to all the photos you may have taken last year as an example.
Lots of good opinions here.
For our desktop Macs that create income where reliability is important, we use self-powered USB3 enclosures into which I install a quality 3.5-inch SATA 6 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive (takes five minutes). I use this enclosure:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T00/
"Self-powered" means the enclosure comes with a independent powers supply, so it is not robbing power from the computer's USB port or a hub.
For my travel laptops, I'm willing to go "bus-powered" as long as it is an SSD (typically less power draw than older mech drives. This is what I now use on my new Macbook Pro:
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-envoy
You can get it with 1TB and 2TB capacity. At ~1000MB/sec, it is about 2/3rds faster than most SATA 6B SSDs in a USB-C enclosure, but less than a Thunderbolt (2700+MB/sc). It is plenty fast for Time Machine.
You don't absolutely need a thunderbolt 5 drive.
Any external drive will work fine for photo editing.
Whether it's USB-A or USB-C. Most now are USB-C, that should not be an issue.
My suggestions for good quality drives at affordable prices are as follows.
click here ➜ Crucial 2TB 2100MBps USB-C external drive - Amazon.com
click here ➜ Samsung T7 2TB SSD - Amazon.com
click here ➜ PNY 2TB, 2000MBps SSD - Amazon.com
I use Crucial X9 SSD on all my Macs for Time Machine backups (including on my own M4 Mac Mini Pro). Crucial is now showing the X9 as end of life, though from my experience, an excellent drive. Available in 1, 2, and 4 TB capacities. It is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gb/s) drive that comes formatted as exFAT and with a comparable USB-C cable.
The Crucial X10 is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (2x2, 20Gbps) drive that I have not purchased since the USB-C ports on my Macs are not 2x2, and I have no knowledge if the drive and its higher-performance USB-C cable would be compatible. It does come in 1, 2, 4, 6, and even 8 TB capacities.
The OWC vendor has some USB-C compatible external drives including the USB4 Envoy Express.
I purchased the TB5 OWC Envoy Ultra and use it for my Parallel's Desktop guest operating systems. Not as fast as OWC advertises on my TB5 port of the M4 Mac Mini Pro running Tahoe 26.0.1. You don't need one of these to store images.
Hi,
You'd better get USB-C interface external HDD, since it's not expensive if you compare with thunderbolt-5 drives.
Hubs like you mention have a tendency to eject drives unexpectedly leading to warning notices popping up.
This could be because they are powered by the computer and don't have their own supply.
Their only real advantage is that they look pretty but the connections on them are very limiting.
Much better to buy a powered multiport hub and NVMe caddies at a fraction of the price.
The jury is still out as to whether they make the Mac run cooler or hotter.
Thanks for the info, this was all very helpful. After doing some research, I think I'm going to go with a Satechi Mac mini M4 hub and stand and a 4.0TB OWC Aura Pro IV PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 2280 Solid-State Drive. I have more than 1TB of photo files now, so 4TB will give me enough storage for a couple more years and portability is not really an issue. Any downsides to this setup?
The Mac and the drive should negotiate the highest USB speed which both have in common.
The word "should" is not definitive and may be the harbinger of disappointment. 🧐 The only way to know for certain is to purchase an X10 Pro and test with its 2x2 capable USB cable.
By the way, I ripped my 150+ music CDs to 192 KHz MP3 onto a FAT32 formatted X9 and it is the AUX USB music source in my 2011 Saab 9-5 Turbo Premium. Owing to a different radio (navigation unit) in my other 2011 Saab 9-5 Aero, it rejects the X9 entirely and I need to use the same content on a USB stick.
VikingOSX wrote:
By the way, I ripped my 150+ music CDs to 192 KHz MP3 onto a FAT32 formatted X9 and it is the AUX USB music source in my 2011 Saab 9-5 Turbo Premium. Owing to a different radio (navigation unit) in my other 2011 Saab 9-5 Aero, it rejects the X9 entirely and I need to use the same content on a USB stick.
That may be an issue with trying to use the FAT32 filesystem on a drive that has a capacity of more than 32 GB. Some FAT32 implementations will not format volumes that have capacities in excess of 32 GB. The Crucial X9 drives all have capacities of 1 TB or more.
Others will, e.g. Seagate – Formatting a Large Drive Greater Than 32GB with a FAT32 File System Using Seagate DiscWizard .
If you look at SD Association – Capacity (SD/SDHC/SDXC/SDUC), you'll see that the standard filesystem for SD-family cards s FAT32 for SDHC cards ("more than 2 GB, up to 32 GB") – but is exFAT for higher-capacity SDXC and SDUC cards. I suspect that the choice not to use FAT32 for the latter cards is not an accident.
I believe there is 50+ GB on that X9…
The car with the X9 is underneath a car cover and I dont want to undo that right now to get the X9 out and bring it inside to confirm it is FAT32 formatted. I believe the Saab radio cannot cope with exFAT formatted drives.
[Edited by Moderator]
need external drive for mac mini M4 Pro
