I want to move my Mac Home folder to an external drive

May 1, 2022 11:37 AM

My company is buying me a new Mac studio. Since this will be my sole computer I'd like to move my home folder to an external drive so as to not co-mingle information. 1) I need high speed drives. Is SSD the best way to go and if so would portable SSDs work or should I get something larger? 2) Any recommendations? Thanks.
posted by captainscared to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I have a similar, but slightly different setup (it's on a Mac Mini). I have one of these drives in one of these enclosures. It is plenty fast for me. It's not as fast as the internal storage, but it is definitely fast enough for me to use as a sort of "extended storage." It is fast enough that I basically never notice whether I'm doing work on the internal or external drive.

If you're someone who likes numbers, I just ran a speed test and was getting 850 MB/s write speed and ~800 MB/s read speed with this configuration.
posted by Betelgeuse at 12:28 PM on May 1, 2022

Use a NVMe drive in a Thunderbolt enclosure for the fastest (3-5,000 MB/s) speeds. USB3 is good, but good Thunderbolt is stellar.
posted by k3ninho at 12:59 PM on May 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yes. As k3ninho says, if blazing fast speed is important to you, opt for a Thunderbolt enclosure instead of the USB3 enclosure I linked above. Here's a decently reviewed one. Note that most of what out there (including my link here) for enclosures is Thunderbolt 3; your Mac Studio will support Thunderbolt 4, which is even faster, but it's new enough that there aren't a ton of Thunderbolt 4 enclosures out there.
posted by Betelgeuse at 2:12 PM on May 1, 2022 [2 favorites]