Hard drive swap options

[onomike]

Want to get some opinions from the illuminati here at MR. I've got a 2011 base mini that I added 8gb ram used primarily as a media server, and a late 2008 MBP. The mini has the stock 500gb hdd, and it's about 90% full. About 370gb contains music, videos and photos. Best guess is that this will grow by about 25gb per year.

Over the weekend Amazon has had the Crucial M500 960gb ssd for $439. So one option I'm considering is swapping the mini hard drive with the ssd and swapping the mini had drive into the MBP (the MBP hd is 320gb). I plan to use carbon copy cloner to replicate the drives.

Another option is to buy a refurb 2012 Mac mini server to get 2 1tb drives, which I expect would take care of storage needs for a very long time. I would wait for a 2013/14 mini refresh since the refurb server will drop to $759 if patterns hold true. I would max the memory on my own and sell the old mini if I go this route, so the cost of both options is probably similar, net.

With option 1 I gain speed, and with 2 I gain space. Any processor or graphics improvement don't seem consequential for my needs, so what do y'all think? Any other interesting options?

Thanks for your opinions!

 

[ColdCase]

Perhaps think about plugging in a USB drive for space, you can get 4TB for ~$150.

 

[djc6]

n/m I need to work on reading comprehension.

 

[Micky Do]

Perhaps think about plugging in a USB drive for space, you can get 4TB for ~$150.

What I was going to suggest…..

Simple soul that I am, KISS works for me.

Also consider culling a good bit of what you have stored on your present HDD. Surely you don't want all that stuff. After more than 4 years I still have about 72 GB of free space on the original 120 GB HDD my Mini came with.

I take quite a few photos, some of which are used to with news reports in the local newspaper. I only keep the best. I empty the rubbish bin frequently. I can recover whatever I want from Time Machine, but seldom need to.

 

[Giuly]

Those $439 buy you 3x 4TB WD MyBook, which gives you 12TB instead of 1TB. And if you RAID0 them, it'll be as fast as the SSD, too.

If you really want to add a second internal hard drive, consider the 1.5TB HGST Travelstar instead. And you'd need the OWC DataDoubler kit to install it, as the Mac Mini doesn't have the cable for the second hard drive inside.

 

[onomike]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions!