Transitioning from the Family Mac... or keep the central machine?

[Johnontheweb]

Hi Macrumor Braintrust,

For years we've had a "Central family iMac" that houses all the photos, music, documents, scans, home movies, etc. We stream movies from it, Ripped all the DVDs in the house and discarded all optical media. If we can easily stream a movie from a streamer (e.g Netflix), we don't keep a copy. Photos from iOS devices end up here. It doesn't get used very often... we tend to stay on our laptops.

All iOS devices back-up to the iMac. The parents have two laptops.

The iMac and laptops backup to two large external drives. One is always offsite.

Now it is time to replace the Central iMac. three options:

1) Replace and migrate to a new iMac. Problem is that new iMacs top out at 2Tb for an SSD, I'll need 4Tb.
2) Replace and migrate to a new MBP with a display, lose one parental laptop. Your entire life is on a laptop that travels
3) Replace and migrate to a new Mac studio (The Mini storage is limited to 2Tb) and a screen.

So stationary central Mac or two portables of which only one holds it all?

What do you intend to do with all the digital assets accumulated over 30 years?

Thanks in advance to all,

John

 

[leonremi]

ideally i would wait for Apple to finally deign to update the iMac 27 inches with a decent hard drive.

Or for a mac studio

or, if it's mostly to be used as a remote disk ... a mac mini?

 

[pmiles]

You should be looking at a NAS or a cloud storage device. All of your devices can connect to it via a router or wireless. You've basically been using your Central iMac as one all this time. You have unlimited storage (per se) with a NAS or cloud storage.

You're never going to see a Mac with built-in storage designed to do what a NAS or cloud storage can do... unless you have the wallet of Elon Musk.

 

[Feek]

M1 Mac mini with external storage. If it's only used as a NAS then you can run it headless, it'll use less power.

 

[tonmischa]

If someone is sitting in front of your "central family Mac" regularly, then: Mac mini + external (spinning) hard drive(s).
If not, then NAS.

Using internal SSDs for media and backup storage sounds unnecessarily expensive to me.

Your option 2 ("Replace and migrate to a new MBP with a display, lose one parental laptop. Your entire life is on a laptop that travels") would be an absolute No-Go for me.

 

[glenthompson]

I completely agree with @tonmischa as I do something similar. I had an unused display so I have that hooked up but could run headless if needed. While something like a Synology NAS would work great, it's easier to only deal with one OS.

 

[HDFan]

Problem is that new iMacs top out at 2Tb for an SSD, I'll need 4Tb.

For what? If it is for media storage just add an external HD. Otherwise a NAS such as QNAP or Synology might be good. If you have 4K media to stream you will need a powerful CPU/GPU for transcoding which is more expensive If you intend to connect other systems to it via WiFi then that brings up other issues.