Using external drive for mac studio since internal drive full

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Level 1

4 points

Using external drive for mac studio since internal drive full

My mac studio internal hard rive is full so i purchased a 2tb external drive to add storage. Formatted the drive using disk utility. How do i get the mac to start storing data to this drive. I do not want to boot from the external hard drive but want as much data to be stored directly to it as if it was thy internal drive. Internal drive current usage: Apps 25gb, docs 10 gb, icloud 54gb, parallels vm 112 gb , messages 41gb. these are the big ones. Was hoping to switch storage location for the iCloud and parallels to be on external automatically. Thanks in advance for any help.

Mac Studio, macOS 14.4

Posted on Jan 13, 2025 8:29 AM

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Answer 1

den.thed

Level 10

83,674 points

Jan 13, 2025 11:35 AM in response to macorwin

Moving, storing and accessing files or libraries to an external hard drive is fairly straight forward.

Create new folders on the external drive, then move your documents and files to them.

App's and Users should be kept on the Mac's startup drive.

If you are looking for more space, move your Photos, Music, Movie Libraries to an external hard drive.

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support

Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support

Just keep in mind, that external drive should be backed up to a second external drive to protect your files and libraries.

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Answer 2

Jan 13, 2025 11:29 AM in response to macorwin

The Mac will not treat the external drive as an extension of the internal one. If you want to move things like Parallels virtual machine images to the external drive, you must move them there.

I believe that for most types of iCloud synchronization, any local storage that's needed will come from your startup drive. In the specific case of iCloud Photos, it might be possible to move your system Photos Library (the one that synchronizes with iCloud) from your startup drive to another drive. Ideally one that is going to be mounted all/most of the time, so that the Mac can carry out synchronization tasks in the background.

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