External Data

About a year ago, I finally overflowed the confines of this laptop. When I bought it, I looked hard at the model with a terabyte of storage, but couldn’t quite justify the extra $500 for it. When I transferred my data to it, I gained back about 50 GBs of space, probably due to logs that didn’t get transferred over, but gradually filled it up, due in large part to my slide scanning project. I’d bought a couple of external drives for my old Mac, and when I finished the slides, I moved them all off the internal SSD onto one of the external drives, reclaiming about 20 GB or so. Finally, though, I had to bite the bullet and move my iTunes library off the laptop and onto the hard drive, and finally got the computer to a point where it had a safe amount of free space. Now that I’m starting to shoot video, there is no question but that I need the extra space.

So what’s it like having to tether the laptop to an external drive? For my day-to-day use, it’s not an issue. I don’t need it to read Twitter or my news feeds, and I’ve kept my photo library – still in Aperture, though for how much longer I don’t know – on the laptop. When I need to use iTunes, I do need to connect the drive, but I only do that when I feel like browsing the store or backing up my devices (I moved the device backups to the external drive too).

I’m finding it’s a little more irritating where the video is concerned. I have to plug it in to transfer video from the drone’s SD card, or to edit or look at it. And this video really wants to be looked at.

The biggest pain point when dealing with the external drive is unmounting it. You have to be careful to close any open apps, and any open files before dismounting it. And since my personal Mac shares my desk with my work Mac, I’m moving it to one side on a daily basis. It’s very easy to just pull the plug on it without checking first, especially since it plugs in via Thunderbolt… just like the monitor.

It definitely makes the computer less portable. I still haven’t figured out how I’ll handle things on a trip.