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how do you guys deal with the small hard drive?

J

jerwin

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Jun 13, 2015
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My sister likes the idea of the $699 mac mini-- but the 128 GB drive seems quite small-- even for a pared down selection of apps.

Are there any strategies to get everything to fit? I have my iTunes and photo libraries on an external, but that's with 1.125 GB worth of fusion drive.
 
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I don't deal with that at all. Since price increases for RAM & SSD upgrades are beyond sanity I avoid buying new Apple stuff until they came to their senses. Otherwise I see myself forced to switch to other platforms.
 
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The standard answer I'm seeing, and the one I'll use when I buy a new Mini, is to purchase an external SSD (like the Samsung T5, currently about $210 for a 1TB version at Amazon) and push as much user-space storage to that as possible. I've got a 256 GB SSD in my 2011 iMac and without making much of an effort I'm at 143 GB total use. I could get that down to below 100 GB by pushing my main user subdirectory over to my internal 3TB spinner, which is slower than an external T5 hooked up via USB 3 would be. The main question here is comfort level by the user, or the user's IT assistant, in configuring the placement of the filesystem parts between the internal and external SSDs. It's not rocket science, but some care must be taken mostly because some apps (and some OS parts) may be a bit sloppy and can't deal with stuff not on the "home" hardware of the main filesystem.
 
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I’ve been using a 2014 MBP with 128GB for almost 4 years and I’ve always managed and still have about 50GB free. The trick is keeping it clean from junk and use an external drive for iTunes, movies, photos, etc. Or if speed isn’t a priority, then you can even get a 512GB/1TB usb stick and leave it permanently attached to the mini, especially if most of the times you’re reading from the stick rather than writing.
 
This Ministack with a 2TB HDD has been going strong for 6 years already.
Might just spray-paint it to space grey to match my 2018 Mac Mini lol. :)

or maybe upgrade to a multi NVME SSD enclosure, to get the same speeds as the internal SSD.
 

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I have a MacBook Air with 128gb and had to clean it up a ton. What killed me was all the iMessage chats that took up gigabytes that i wasn’t expecting. I think now you can have messages in the cloud which would help.
 
128 could be enough for the OS and apps. Depends on what she's doing with it.

Just keep documents, downloads, photos, music, etc. on an external.
 
I've had my mini for about three weeks. Here is my internal drive usage as of a few minutes ago (see screen capture below).

Total: 499.96GB
Available: 442.57

Used:
Applications: 16.22GB (the usual plus Final Cut, Logic, Lightroom, Photoshop, Motion, Compressor, etc)
System: 32.09GB
Data: 9.08GB

System depends entirely on how much drive space is available. For the purpose of this discussion, my 32.09GB is not a meaningful number.

I use my internal drive as a workspace and anything that I'm not working on is on external drives. Issues apparent here are iMessage, which I'll clear out, and Mail, which I archive regularly.

This is typical of my internal drive usage at the end of a day.

Screenshot 2018-12-27 at 10.50.00 PM.png
 
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Her most intensive workload is OCR, and her curent cpu is a macbook 11 inch from 2013.

My imac (2014 5k) was three times as fast on those workloads.
 
jerwin said:
Her most intensive workload is OCR, and her curent cpu is a macbook 11 inch from 2013.

My imac (2014 5k) was three times as fast on those workloads.
Click to expand...

Whether the i3 CPU is fast enough is a different question. I don't know what OCR is, except that it is sometimes an acronym for Optical Character Recognition, but for people doing standard browsing, writing, uncomplicated photo editing, watching videos, all indications are that the i3 is fine.

There's a point where this comes down to how much money people want to spend. I like the i5/256 a lot, but not everyone wants to spend that.
 
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yes. OCR is "optical character recognition". Producing ebooks from scans of real books. Sort of like Google Books, but on a smaller scale.
It's a rather cpu intensive workload. I'm a little surprised that it's not already the subject of benchmarks.
 
jerwin said:
My sister likes the idea of the $699 mac mini-- but the 128 GB drive seems quite small-- even for a pared down selection of apps.

Are there any strategies to get everything to fit? I have my iTunes and photo libraries on an external, but that's with 1.125 GB worth of fusion drive.
Click to expand...

I guess that depends on what you do with your computer. Photography and video production demands a lot of storage, but only a fraction of it needs to be fast. Collecting movies needs a lot of storage too, while music is less demanding.

So if you need storage, use external disks. That is how these things work. You don't put all you have on the internal SSD, that is just for system, apps, cache and scratch. Unless you just have a tiny amount of documents, but then you might as well get an Ipad or something.

I have an 8 TB external TB3 disk, and I will grow with additional disks as demand requires.
 
You could persuade her to get the i5 Mini, which comes with 256gb standard.

Then, use external USB3 storage for "additional space".
Either SSD or HDD, her choice.
 
I just sucked it up and went for i7/16GB RAM/256GB SSD. Best CPU, plenty of RAM for me (casual user), an more than enough SSD space for me (used 80GB so far), yet I'll just add a cheap SATA SSD for non-urgent needs when required. They are more than fast enough.
 
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Fishrrman said:
"How difficult is it to boot and run Mojave from an external SSD?"

No more difficult than booting and running older versions of the Mac OS the same way.
I've been doing it for 30 years.
Click to expand...
So then if I wanted to boot from an External SSD all I would have to do is have my created bootable USB drive, hold down the "option key". Run disk utility, partition the external thunderbolt 3 SSD drive as APFS, do a quick erase, quit disk utility. Then select install Mojave and point it to the thunderbolt 3 external SSD drive and wait till it's finished? Then after the installation is done go to system prefs and change the startup disk to the external thunderbolt 3 SSD. Am I missing anything?

And I guess I have to change something in settings regarding the T2 security chip so I can boot from the external SSD?
 
I also use my machine for large files via scanning and saving them in huge files with ABBYY. Alas the actual OCRing is done on a windows machine because ABBYY files are not cross platform compatible. I have 1 tb on the Mac mini but have 2 cheap 10tb 5400rmp drives attached externally via USB3. I purchased a $25 UGREEN usb3 7 port hub and attached the drives to it. I moved all my pictures and movies to the external drive via preferences. Then I created a Kathy directory and store all my files on it, not on the local hard drive under /user/kathy. I was a surprisingly simple process. See my attached picture of Bertha, the scanner. Looks like I've used 160gb of 1tb on the boot drive. I don't think I would go with the low 128gb as that will be a pain, probably 256 or 512 minimum.
 

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harriska2 said:
I also use my machine for large files via scanning and saving them in huge files with ABBYY. Alas the actual OCRing is done on a windows machine because ABBYY files are not cross platform compatible. I have 1 tb on the Mac mini but have 2 cheap 10tb 5400rmp drives attached externally via USB3. I purchased a $25 UGREEN usb3 7 port hub and attached the drives to it. I moved all my pictures and movies to the external drive via preferences. Then I created a Kathy directory and store all my files on it, not on the local hard drive under /user/kathy. I was a surprisingly simple process. See my attached picture of Bertha, the scanner. Looks like I've used 160gb of 1tb on the boot drive. I don't think I would go with the low 128gb as that will be a pain, probably 256 or 512 minimum.
Click to expand...
Abbyy's priorities on the mac are a little strange. "We'll take away the option to edit the resulting text, but we'll give you scripting."
 
Just boot into the recovery menu (CMD + R), then from there you can enable booting from usb.

I have the 512GB model and for my Win10 bootcamp partition, I allocated 100GB of the internal drive. For my other win10 files/applications I use an external 500GB ssd that I already had. I’d imagine your sister could do the same except with macOS of course.
 
jerwin said:
Abbyy's priorities on the mac are a little strange. "We'll take away the option to edit the resulting text, but we'll give you scripting."
Click to expand...
Yeah, I’ve noticed some of that. It’s why I’ll just keep a win7 machine - plus I have a big scanner with amazing twain drivers. I don’t scan often but when I do nothing that works on mac is close to what I have (rated at 100k scans a month).
 
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