What To Know Before Buying a Mac With a Small Drive Plus an External

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Thinking of getting a new Mac with the smallest internal drive and then supplementing it with an external drive? Well, here's what you should know. 

A common thing for people to do when buying a new Mac is to decide to get the smallest possible internal drive with a large external drive. There is one major advantage to doing that. That's cost. Apple charges an extreme amount for internal storage. For instance, here in the base Mac Mini you only get 256GB of storage. If you want to go and double that to half a terabyte you're spending $200. One terabyte is going to set you back $400 and two terabytes is going to set you back $800. That's a lot of money! It is easy to see that you can get a 2 terabyte external drive for much, much less than this. That's really the only reason to consider getting a big external drive, to save money. But it is a big reason. So if you decide to do that there are some pretty major drawbacks that you should know about. There's also a good middle ground that is probably the best option for most people. 

The first drawback is if you have a MacBook. If you have a MacBook you probably like that it is portable and easy to bring with you whether it's from room-to-room in your home or to take with you to work or school or travel. But if you then get an external drive now you're bringing both of these. Depending upon how you use this you may actually have to have it connected all the time, even while it is sleeping and be careful not to accidentally disconnect it. So it is going to make your MacBook far less portable by always having to bring this around. You may get used to it but it definitely is a lot easier just to grab this than to grab the pair. 

Another great thing about MacBooks is their battery life. How long the battery lasts. But when you hook this up to it this is using the battery too. So the battery won't last as long throughout the day. Another thing to think about. 

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So the next drawback is speed. One of the reasons that the drives in Apple's computer is expensive is that they are very fast SSD's. SSD's have different speeds. If you look on line, you can look at Amazon here and see what the deals are for today, and you can see there's a 2 terabyte SSD for less than $150. But if you look at the speed it's just above 1000MB per second. As a matter of fact it says up to. So that is the maximum speed. The average speed is going to be much less. However, the average speed of Apple's internal drives are much faster than that. They don't publish the speeds but people know it through doing benchmarks. It is typical even on the lower end to find 3000MB per second and on the upper end to go to 6 or 7000MG per second. So you definitely have a big speed difference. The difference is going to be caused partially by the connection, especially if it is a USB that you're connecting to your Mac with. It will be better if it's Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is going to be faster. But also there is the speed of the internal parts of the SSD. They, typically, will be slower as well. You can do better by using a faster drive. So you can go up a price a bit and see the Up To speeds get a little bit better. You can even go with a Thunderbolt drive and you can see they get considerably better than this but still, probably less than what you are getting with the internal drive. Notice the price has gone up quite a bit at this point. It is still going to be cheaper than getting Apple's storage. But the difference isn't going to be so much. A lot of times when people advocate getting external drives they always talk about the cheap external drives and not the ones that will be closer at matching Apple's speeds. So keep in mind while you'll be saving something you may not be saving as much as you think if you want to try to keep performance at a premium. 

Speed can be Important for even for casual Mac users. For instance, here I am just looking at my photos, something a typical Mac user will want to do. Watch what happens when I scroll. Look at all of these photos here that I'm scrolling through. It's accessing a ton of data on the drive just doing this. I may find that it's not as easy to flip through my photos anymore with them on an external drive. 

If you're doing something like video editing you may also find that storing the project on an external drive means you're editing goes slower. The same thing with working with large sound libraries for music creation and other tasks. 

Here's another thing to consider. It's not easy to use an external drive for certain things on your Mac. For instance, your system is going to want to be on the internal drive. The same thing with your user folder, your Home folder. In addition to that using iCloud Drive the cache for that, no matter how you have the optimize setting set is going to be in your User Folder in your Library Folder there and that's going to be on your internal drive. You have two Library Folders. The one at the top level here but also in your User Folder you've got a Library folder there as well. It's usually hidden but you can get to it by using Go, Option, and there's Library. You're going to find applications stored tons of data including caches here. As these grow you're going to loose space from your internal drive. It doesn't matter how big your external drive is. 

Even more important than that is something called Swap. So this involves memory on your Mac. Yes, memory RAM and your Storage or your SSD they are intertwined and this is how modern computer systems work. It's hard to understand it unless you know something about computer science. But basically when apps use memory there's high-priority memory item and low-priority memory items. The high-priority ones are accessed all the time and they are always stored in RAM. But the low-priority  ones don't need to take up space in RAM. They can be stored on the SSD which, of course, since it is Apple's internal storage is pretty fast. 

I've got a lot of memory here in my Mac Studio. So looking in Activity Monitor under Memory you can see I'm not using any Swap right now. But it's fairly typical to actually see some Swap used. While I'm probably editing this video it will probably be using more memory and then going over to Swap. Swap memory on your internal SSD is used to speed things up. But here's the thing. If you fill up your internal drive there's no room on it for Swap memory. So you want to leave a good portion of your internal drive empty so it can be used for this. If you get a small drive, like at 256G drive it's easy to fill that almost completely up with the system, with your library, with your applications, and with your files until there is almost nothing left. If you are using 240G out of 256G there's really nothing available for Swap memory there. Everything is going to slow down. There's nothing you can do to put this Swap memory on an external drive, even if you could it would be slower there. 

So I mentioned before that using an external drive, instead of spending more money on internal storage, is a good idea. But I've also given you a lot of downsides. That's because there are some bad ways you can use an external drive and some good ways to use an external drive. There are two methods I consider pretty bad because they are difficult to maintain. One is booting from the external drive and the other is putting your  Home Folder on the external drive. That solves a lot of the problems I've talked about before BUT it complicates things because probably the external drive is slower. So you're slowing down your entire Mac by doing that. But also there's a lot to learn, a lot of difficulty in setting it up, and you have to continue to maintain it. As Apple has updated macOS there have been difficulties for people who have booted from or put their User Folder on an external drive. So if you're going to go that route be prepared to spend a lot of time figuring out how to set it up and then, even more time in the future, maintaining it so it will keep working in future version of macOS. I know I'm going to get some people commenting here that it's not that hard and that's how they do it. But I think for casual users and home users this is just not something you want to do. It's certainly something I don't recommend to anybody and it is certainly something I don't do myself. I've better things to spend my time and energy on. 

Other bad ways to use the external drive are to put your applications there. A lot of people think doing that is a good idea because the Applications take up a lot of space. But remember when you run Applications from an external drive it's going to make the application run slower. Another thing people will do is actually put the files they are working on on the external drive. But that's also going to slow things down. 

So let's talk about a better way.to use an external drive. I think the main way to use an external drive is to get a big enough internal drive to handle what you're doing at any given time. Use the external drive to archive all projects. Now by archiving I simply mean taking files that you're not using right now and putting them on the external drive.  These could be documents that you have finished with for now but you certainly don't want to delete them. So you move those to the external drive. The ones you're still working on, like your current projects or files you update all the time, you keep those on the internal drive. This is, in fact, how I do it. I keep everything I'm working on on my internal drive on my Mac Studio. I have a 5 terabyte external SSD. When I'm done with things, like say making this very video, it goes to the external drive because chances are I'm not going to need to work with it again. All my old projects like these videos, apps that I have developed in the past or any documents I'm working on that I'm finished with and I don't really need anymore, they go to the external drive where I can easily access them but chances are I'm probably not going to need to work with them. 

An external drive is also a great place to store media, like if you work with video or audio and you want to store lots of clips and things like that on the external drive. You can just simply bring them to your internal drive before you use them in a project. Of course if you've got a lot of data, like for instance you have clients, whether you're an accountant or a graphic artist or whatever you may want to store all the files for all of your clients on the external drive. When you want to work with them you just temporarily bring that file to the internal drive, work with it there and then move it back to the external drive when you're done. 

So a good middle ground that I suggest is never to go with this minimum configuration. It's just too small once you take into account your system, your applications, things in your library folder and so on. You don't have much space left. But going to the next level up for $200 more will not just double your space because the system and all that other stuff is still going to take up the same amount of space. But say if you had 100G left over after that, well going to this level means you now have 356G available. So if you're really worried about the cost I think this level is a really good one because it allows you to still have some flexibility on your internal drive and then use the external drive for archiving all the things you're currently not using. Or for some people that work with big files, like video files and such, going to this level here for an extra $400 gives them plenty of space to do all sorts of different large projects. Anything beyond this can then be stored on an external SSD.

Another good option is to go to that 512G level and then use iCloud Drive ability to optimize Mac storage. So this means that you can store a lot of stuff on iCloud Drive, which yes of course you have to pay for, but you can have, say, a terabyte of stuff in iCloud Drive but only a fraction of that is stored on your Mac's internal drive, the rest you access on demand as you need it. It feels like you have a terabyte of space even though you don't. You have the same setting here in Photos if you go to Photos, Settings, iCloud you've got Optimize Mac Storage here which will do that same thing. It will store all your photos in iCloud and only store the Thumbnails and the most recently accessed photos locally and anything else just is there on demand. That's a great option especially if you go back to thinking about MacBook. You don't want to have an external drive like this that you have to carry around all the time. You can use iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos instead. It is really easy for casual and home users to maintain  then because there is really nothing to do. Once you've turned on Optimize for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos and then you can just use your Mac and not have to worry about where files are stored. 

One last thing I want to mention and that's Backups! If you have a Mac with an internal drive and an external drive make sure you are backing up both. You can do this with Time Machine. You want to get a very large Time Machine drive. Have your Time Machine drive backup both the internal and external drives. Or if you use an online backup make sure you have that online backup service backing up both your internal drive and that external drive.

So there are some things to think about if you want to get an external drive to supplement a smaller internal drive on your new Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.