Computer Question: internal versus external storage space

In the Apple ecosystem you will want both. My suggestion is to get 2-4 Tb external and live with 512 Gb internal. In the Apple ecosystem you will want to setup the Time Machine on the external, which will give versioned backups of your internal. The external will have loads of space to store files that you migrate from the internal, if you run out of space that is.

I can not overstate the value of the Time Machine. If your internal ever fails, the Time Machine will save your ass. Unfortunately I have had this happen more times than I thought possible.

 

^512 internal is more than enough. Time machine with external hd is good. If the backup is too skow, theres a hack online to speed it up.

The new M1 mbp supposedly made older macbook prices drop, but with corona and subsequent chip shortages i think theyre still a bit overpriced secondhand. If you buy secondhand, always ask for the chwrging cycles of the laptop. Less than 200 is great. 200-400 generally means the charge will decline after two years. These suckers could last 4-6 hours on a full charge from simple office work. A half gone battery is still ok for a trip to the coffee shop.

I don't imagine them to be as bad as old dell laptop batteries though. Had to stay plugged in after a couple years..,,

The M1 supposedly beats most in battery life, but averages go pear shaped when you do something like non-app gaming, coding or intel emulation. Prob another year or two before they can completely replace intel cores on their top of the line laptops, but thats either optimistic or fair depending on who you ask. I still consider it a fancier ipad pro with hardware upgrades...

 

Are you using apple’s website correctly to price upgrades?

It is a $400 diff from 256 ssd to 1tb ssd
Works like this:
It is a $200 upgrade from 256 to 512
It is a $400 from 256 to 1tb

where it says $400 for 1tb, thats the total upgrade from base model, not an incremental increase from 512.

btw: you can get the base mode at 256 GB, then get a LaCie 1tb ssd with 450MB/s throughput benchmarks for $149 on sale at Amazon. Thats $70 off the Apple website price,,,not exact same model that Apple sells exclusively, but same speed benchmarks

also, those flashbrives you’re quoting are unlikley to be fast at that price. Probably 5x slower than the Lacie, and vastly slower than the internal.

heres the Amazon deal

 

fwiw: i recently bought a MBP, and pretty sure RR is quoting the ssd upgrades wrong. The base model is 256. So 512 is a $200 upgrade.

would you give same advice knowing he has to pay $200 above base just to get to 512?
Its a $400 upgrade from 256 tp 1tb

And the super fast Lacie (apple exclusive) external ssd 1tb is $219, with an Amazon deal going on for a similar model Lacie for $149

 

Are you comparing the same technology?
there's regular spinning drives, solid state drivers (SATA vs NVME..)

If you are comparing 5400 RPM 1TB external to a 1TB NVME internal drive......you are going to be very shocked.

 

Thats correct,,,starting prior to releae of the M1. In July new MBPs went on sale $400 off ... Apple never puts those on sell. But it was obvious that happened because the M1 was coming out a few months later. I snatched one up and put saving into maxing RAM and SSD .... man, its super lightweight with long battery, very well built.

Thats what Im paying apple for, along with the OS that is superior than windows for software/app development. Developers switched to Mac awhile ago with the linux-like ease.

 

I agree completely. 512GB is more than enough for IOS and whatever applications you want to run on your MacBook. Use the external HD and Time Machine to save and backup your system and you will be able to recover from any hardware failures with no loss of essential data.

 

Not that it matters to your support of 512GB ram, Mac’s run macOS, not iOS.

But one of the breakthrough things of the M1 chip, is they theoretically run iOS apps, but not quite out of the box support for them, yet.

@Rocket River, I don’t have an M1 chip (I bought last July during the sale), but I am in favor of them, from what I know. The design specs for them were around super efficient processing to limit energy use, and a small footprint ... yet still high performance. Apple wanted a future around longer lasting batteries, as they upped performance. M1 also supposedly has onboard improvements for image processing of the camera, clearing way for future 4K cams. And as I said above, they were designed to run iOS apps, so users can download from the App Store, for first time.

it was a major engineering leap for them. 18-20 hour battery is ridiculous, and support for iOS apps is certainly a direction they wanted ongoing.

However, while advancing battery life significantly while still upping performance, it will take another leap with the M2 to entirely replace the Intel chips still used in their top-performing machines.

 

The biggest money savings to use on upgrades with some real bang in your selection is to go with a Mac Mini, especially if you need a monitor anyhow. They are surprisingly small (can fit in my briefcase), but I needed a laptop too, for mobility.

and a mini has an actual HDMI port, so you don’t have to fork out money on adapters for monitors.

anyhoot, you’ll love a laptop. But I’d do a mini before I’d do an iMac.

 

You dont have to buy a Mac display for any mac, fwiw.

 

They do. And they dont have to be Mac displays.

Have you not been to the store yet? I just drove by one, today ... looks like they’ve reopened the showrooms now.

 

The #1 perceptible key performance index in data/memory access is seek time.

Whatever is closest to the GPU/CPU will be the fastest. That starts with the CPU cache / GPU cache. Past that is GPU memory (for GPUs). RAM is a separate unit from the CPU/GPU so you start having choices at this stage -- but the impact in performance isn't all that much. More RAM is always better since it means you can have programs cache more memory directly in RAM versus having to access disk/SSD.

Once we get to internal storage is when seek time matters. SSDs are an order of magnitude faster to seek data. Hard drives have to mechanically spin to access data. Its still fast when we are talking about absolutes we are talking about milliseconds and less, but over time its perceptible to humans. Throughput is also an order of magnitude faster -- but most people don't have the internet speed to take full advantage anyway.

External storage same concept as last paragraph but now you have to use the USB interface to get data from the storage to your RAM / internal processors rather than the faster SATA / PCI interfaces for your internal storage components.

tl;dr: Don't expect an external SSD to replace even an internal HDD.

 

In my hunt for chia farming gear and research for buying STX and WDC shares, I recently went down a rabbit hole trying to understand the price difference for similar performing internal HDDs and external HDDs. The price difference for similar performing HDD drives is so big, that farmers buying external HDDs are shucking them and placing them into racks for use as internal drives. This phenomenon has been happening for years, how to for shucking from 2017:
https://www.howtogeek.com/324769/ho...drives-for-cheap-by-shucking-external-drives/

Best answer I could find for the discrepancy was to the qn phrased differently: why is internal computer storage space priced so much more expensive than external? Answer: because they can get away with pricing a premium for internal drives to the smaller enthusiast market (peeps who assemble their own PCs). The retail market for external storage (which includes casual users that use laptops) has less pricing elasticity but much higher volume, hence is still worth catering to at lower margin.