Be smart about your disk drive and storage decision-making
People ask me many questions about their
Macs, and many (if not the majority) of those questions have to do with disks and storage. Their issues fall into three main categories:
• My startup disk is dead or dying;
• My startup disk is nearly full;
• I need a backup disk (or an additional backup disk).
If your dead or dying startup disk is a hard drive, replacing it with a solidstate drive (SSD) will significantly improve your Mac’s performance. It will also cost significantly more per gigabyte than a slower mechanical hard drive. Still, an SSD will make your Mac feel somuch faster and more responsive it’s worth every penny.
Desktop Mac users can save a bit of cash by not replacing the dead internal drive at all. Instead, purchase an external drive — preferably a solid-state USB 3 drive — and use that as your boot disk.
To see if your startup disk is nearly full, select its icon in the Finder and choose File > Get Info. When there is 10 percent or less space available, you’re likely to start experiencing slowdowns or worse. And, the closer it gets to 100 percent, the more likely you’ll soon encounter big trouble.
So, the first thing to do is determine which files or folders in your Home directory are using the most disk space. The easiest
(and least expensive) way is to choose About This Mac from the Apple menu, click the Storage tab, and then click the Manage button.
On the Manage screen, choose Recommendations in the sidebar to see a quartet of options for managing your files. Or, click one of the file types below Recommendations in the sidebar (namely Applications, Messages, Music, Photos, and such) to see your files of that type sorted by size. Click an item (or Command+click to select multiple items), and then click Delete to remove them permanently.
Don’t forget that if your Music, Movies, or Pictures folders are part of the problem, it’s easy tomove their contents to an external drive via the Preferences windows of the Music, iTunes, Movies, or Photos apps. Once again, an external SSD will be faster and more responsive than a hard disk at a higher cost per gigabyte.
Finally, look for a backup disk at least twice the size of your startup disk (and preferably larger). Some people (not me) agonize over MTBF (mean time between failure) statistics before buying. I believe all drives will fail eventually and plan for that with a redundant backup system. So, I shop for the least expensive drive that serves my needs. Then, I duplicate (or triplicate) its contents to another disk or cloud storage.
One more thing: I’ve relied upon Backblaze ( www.backblaze.com) for my cloud-based backups for nearly a decade. At $6 a month for unlimited backups, it’s cheap insurance against disaster.