Hi, given that we can just save large files such as photos, videos, downloads directly to an external drive or just move them there manually by drag and drop, why go through all the troubles to move the home folder to an external drive?
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Why Base Mac Mini users do all sorts of things to move their home folder to an external drive?
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It's convenient and simple to have everything in one place and on one drive
Although, I go further and boot totally off external NVMe in a TB enclosure and ignore the internal SSD completely
Running flawlessly now for nearly a full month since I got the M4 Mini base
Although, I go further and boot totally off external NVMe in a TB enclosure and ignore the internal SSD completely
Running flawlessly now for nearly a full month since I got the M4 Mini base
There are a multitude of reasons. Some that come to mind at the moment are:
• It falls within the realm of “I like to tinker.” In other words, it’s a challenge to accomplish, where time spent isn’t an expense but rather satisfaction.
• Believe it’s “sticking it to the man.” Although, the man — in this case Apple — mostly likely couldn’t care less.
I guess, I’ll say in my opinion…”Frankensteining,” “Jerry rigging,” modding, hacking, whatever you want to call it is okay when trying to extend the usefulness of a tool that has already been utilized to what might be dubbed its end of life is sensible. However, slap sticking solutions to a new item is an apparent doubling down on mistakes, you rationalized buying the wrong tool or version of tool, now you’re going to “fix” it by half-***ing it into the tool it should have been.
• It falls within the realm of “I like to tinker.” In other words, it’s a challenge to accomplish, where time spent isn’t an expense but rather satisfaction.
• Believe it’s “sticking it to the man.” Although, the man — in this case Apple — mostly likely couldn’t care less.
I guess, I’ll say in my opinion…”Frankensteining,” “Jerry rigging,” modding, hacking, whatever you want to call it is okay when trying to extend the usefulness of a tool that has already been utilized to what might be dubbed its end of life is sensible. However, slap sticking solutions to a new item is an apparent doubling down on mistakes, you rationalized buying the wrong tool or version of tool, now you’re going to “fix” it by half-***ing it into the tool it should have been.
Folks are saving money by using much cheaper large storage solutions
Whether "the man" cares or not is irrelevant -- the user themselves is saving their own money
Same. This is the way.
There’s a lot of subjectivity involved. For example, I added an SSD internally — I can’t recall the capacity — to compliment the 500GB HDD of my 2012 Mac mini probably 4-5 years into its life. Then, a few years later, installed macOS onto a 1TB USB 3.1 (NVMe) drive. And, for the most part it was okay. I had to fiddle with aspects such as manually enabling TRIM. Nonetheless, I felt it gave the Mac a couple years more of life through incremental improvements, and I was willing to put the time and effort in.
With my new err current Mac, I have several external drives, which have exhibited annoying behaviors, growing pains of a new/expanding config so to speak. A couple drives for Time Machine, one containing movies I’ve casually collected 😉 over the years, and two USB4 (OWC 1M2) that I’m using as temporary storage and scratch disks for apps such as FCP, OBS, as well as random files to transfer here and there.
That said, I purchased enough err plenty of storage for my current and foreseeable photo, music, and document needs. Using migration, my new Mac setup was essentially working in about an hour. No worrying about reconfiguring drives or software to point to new locations, if an enclosure may not work (i.e., again, my externals are niceties not necessities, generally speaking). Additionally, you get all of the features you expect, paid for with little hassle — software bugs excluded: disk encryption, AI err ML err “smart” features, simple(r) backups, etc.
Ultimately, again, a lot of this boils down to personal preference, priority, whatnot.
I understand that it is cheaper to buy an external drive. Ideally I want to upgrade the internal SSD to 2TB as my previous laptop had a 1TB internal SSD and it was going to run out of space. If I want, I can pay but it is expensive and I don't like TC so I am not going to upgrade the internal to 2TB. I am considering 256GB, 512GB or 1TB.
I cannot understand why move the home folder to an external drive given that any user can just drag and drop the files to an external drive?
I cannot understand why move the home folder to an external drive given that any user can just drag and drop the files to an external drive?
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Actually I don't quite understand Post 2. Does the so-called "Convenience" mean once the Home folder is set up to be in the external drive, all the files are "automatically" stored in the external drive while if I have the Home folder in the 256GB or 512GB internal drive by default, I have to "manually" move the files to an external drive? Is that the only difference? I can imagine that the manual approach is safer due to the potential of connection lost between the external drive and the Mac.
Yes that is the core difference. You retain the home folder as it was designed specifically for the end user, you just move that to a place with more storage. Yes, you can also manually manage your files if that’s your preferred way. That’s how I do it.
Thanks for the clarifications. In this case, is it still better to get 512GB than the 256GB internal SSD? I don't play games on the Mac. I use it to run Windows 3D software on virtual machine, do office productivity work and backup iPhone videos and photos to external drive.
I’ve tried to run macOS solely on my 1TB SanDisk Extreme external SSD, but it would fail to boot the second or third time. Apparently this is an issue with different SanDisk (maybe even WD given the company connections) drives, so keep that in mind. For the people that this has worked for, congratulations on not having to pay $200 for 512GB of internal storage (I envy you)!
Indeed. This is a known issue, and very frustrating. I had a SanDisk fail just a couple months ago.
If I had a Mac mini, I would definitely boot off an external drive. I'm even considering doing so with my 2019 iMac, because the Fusion Drive is proving to be a little unreliable (also a common issue).
I bought a 512gb version just to have a little extra, had I waited to know that the 3rd party storage was going to be feasible, i probably would have bought the base... I hope the 3rd party versions become cheaper as time goes on.
Not a problem I have, but I understand why people are making the effort. For one thing, if you backup your mobile devices, it puts the backup in your home directory. I've managed to link the mobile backup directory to a NAS, but if you don't then local backups are essentially impossible. Likewise, Photos won't index any library except the system library and only if it's in your user/Pictures folder. If you want to include people you know in your Image Playground or genmoji, then that has to be where your photos library resides.
Wondering if a bootable external drive created for my M1 mini would also let me boot my M3 MBP?
I would love to see an individual benchmark of the internal drive as well as the external boot drive.
My external benched slightly faster than the internal -- didn't save a screenshot, my apologies
At worst it was a lateral move that has enormously pleased "my wallet"
That I don't know ... I'm not sure of the intricacies of all this w/ Apple Silicon and if it gets tied to hardware somehow
Anyone?
All that I know is that I once created an external drive on my M1 Mac mini, and it did manage to boot properly on an M1 MacBook Air.
back when i built hackintoshes i put my home directory on a different disk than the boot disk all the time and it was pretty easy to do. when i bought a M1 studio i tried to pull the same trick and things went south pretty fast. never figured out why.
is there some trick to doing this these days? i just moved my largest directories off onto an external disk and created a symlink in my home directory. but it would be nice to just have it all in one place again.
is there some trick to doing this these days? i just moved my largest directories off onto an external disk and created a symlink in my home directory. but it would be nice to just have it all in one place again.
The thing is, there is not just the internal drive and the external boot drive. You would need to bench a 2 TB internal against your chosen 2 TB external to be relevant [or whatever your chosen capacity is].