03-20-2025, 11:21 AM
Robert M wrote:
Bern,
While a 2.5" SATA drive in a USB 3 enclosure can do the job - an iMac I just replaced used a 2.5" SATA SSD as its boot drive - dollar for dollar, it isn't cost effective. An NVME PCIE stick and enclosure are similar in cost to a 2.5" SATA drive in a SATA box these days.
If you go the USB 3 route, for similar costs or a few dollars more, you can get an NVME drive and USB 3.x enclosure and it'd be near twice as fast as the 2.5" SATA solution. Since your dad has an M series machine, I'd go for the faster solution. It makes a difference in booting and makes tangible difference when transferring data from one drive to another and absolutely huge a difference when doing mass backups.
I also prefer a "one and done" configuration. I keep the OS, apps and data all on the boot drive. I keep the entire drive backed up. As necessary, I move data from the main drive to an archive drive and keep a backup of the archive drive. That is in addition to cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and iCloud.
Robert
I’m pretty sure what I’ve got set up for him right now is the internal as boot with OS and apps, and files (might be just his photos library, but that’s pretty much all the substance he has) on the external. All that is backed up to another external as a Time Machine backup.
My initial thought would be to do it the same, but use the current TB drive for OS and apps, and get another drive for the photos library. But, if there’s still plenty of space on the TB, I might just keep it simple and do it all there.