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With a desktop device, the classic filesystem packrat might be best off just buying an external HDD with double-digit TB worth of storage and leaving it plugged

With a desktop device, the classic filesystem packrat might be best off just buying an external HDD with double-digit TB worth of storage and leaving it plugged in all the time.

ghaff 4y ago
Yeah. For a desktop system, I'm not sure there's a good reason to pay a big premium for a really big SSD.
theshrike79 4y ago
Or a petabyte of NAS storage. It's not like you need millisecond access times to every terabyte of your data anyway.
coredog64 4y ago
That presupposes that the user knows how to deal with that. I did it for my wife’s current Mac Mini and never again. Photos is all janky and anything that causes an inconvenience is my fault.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- isolli 4y ago
  So you're answering my question here with a no? "Is it realistic to have an external drive for photos that integrates seamlessly with the native Photos app?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413791
  - coder543 4y ago
    Apple disagrees, and I would take Apple's advice over some random anecdote. There is no reason that an external photo library would be inherently worse than an internal one. If that person actually did use a hard drive (not an NVMe SSD), then yes, the experience would probably be janky. I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well. If someone uses an external SSD with equal or greater performance to the internal SSD, then it would naturally perform as well or better than the internal photo library would have. Apple was putting a ~3GB/s SSD inside the M1 Mac Mini, which is hardly cutting edge and can be matched by an external thunderbolt NVMe enclosure. $120 for the enclosure + $70 for the SSD is still way less than the $400 that Apple is charging, and it can actually be upgraded down the line. Or someone could get a 2TB SSD for $130 (+ $120 for the enclosure). Apple wants $800 for 2TB of storage! Even if Apple upgraded to faster SSDs for the new M2 Mac Mini (which is not clear at all), 3GB/s would still perform exactly as well as it did on the M1 Mac mini's internal SSD, which is to say... it would perform plenty well.
    - isolli 4y ago
      Thanks for the tips!
    - cmatthias 4y ago
      > I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well. Apple's software is garbage so I'm sure you're correct, but modern hard drives can do several hundred MB/s of throughput. How is that not fast enough for a freaking photo application? For Apple not to test/support this use case is inexcusable.
      - coder543 4y ago
        Modern external hard drives are more like 120MB/s, not "several hundred" MB/s, last I checked, but that's only for sequential access. Scanning and accessing a photo library is extremely random I/O and has nothing to do with the peak sequential throughput. Hard drives are awful at random I/O. If Apple kept proper indexes and thumbnails somewhere (especially somewhere fast, like on an SSD), maybe it would be fine, but I have heard some bad things about Apple Photos on hard drives, so they might not be doing things optimally.
        compiler-guy 4y ago
        The pain many people experience with using external hard drives and Apple photos is photos building that index and those thumbnails. Huge amounts of io that apparently need to be rebuilt constantly [1]. Probably also happens on SSDs, but you can’t tell because you can’t hear. 1. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251365140 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251365140 And many, many like it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ehutch79 4y ago
  "I understand that the way I set things up doesn't jive with your workflow. So I'm going to just step back, and let you take care of things exactly how you like. Just keep in mind that I'll be hands off no matter what."

With a desktop device, the classic filesystem packrat might be best off just buying an external HDD with double-digit TB worth of storage and leaving it plugged in all the time.

ghaff 4y ago

Yeah. For a desktop system, I'm not sure there's a good reason to pay a big premium for a really big SSD.

theshrike79 4y ago

Or a petabyte of NAS storage. It's not like you need millisecond access times to every terabyte of your data anyway.

coredog64 4y ago

That presupposes that the user knows how to deal with that. I did it for my wife’s current Mac Mini and never again. Photos is all janky and anything that causes an inconvenience is my fault.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
isolli 4y ago
So you're answering my question here with a no? "Is it realistic to have an external drive for photos that integrates seamlessly with the native Photos app?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413791
- coder543 4y ago
  Apple disagrees, and I would take Apple's advice over some random anecdote. There is no reason that an external photo library would be inherently worse than an internal one. If that person actually did use a hard drive (not an NVMe SSD), then yes, the experience would probably be janky. I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well. If someone uses an external SSD with equal or greater performance to the internal SSD, then it would naturally perform as well or better than the internal photo library would have. Apple was putting a ~3GB/s SSD inside the M1 Mac Mini, which is hardly cutting edge and can be matched by an external thunderbolt NVMe enclosure. $120 for the enclosure + $70 for the SSD is still way less than the $400 that Apple is charging, and it can actually be upgraded down the line. Or someone could get a 2TB SSD for $130 (+ $120 for the enclosure). Apple wants $800 for 2TB of storage! Even if Apple upgraded to faster SSDs for the new M2 Mac Mini (which is not clear at all), 3GB/s would still perform exactly as well as it did on the M1 Mac mini's internal SSD, which is to say... it would perform plenty well.
  - isolli 4y ago
    Thanks for the tips!
  - cmatthias 4y ago
    > I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well. Apple's software is garbage so I'm sure you're correct, but modern hard drives can do several hundred MB/s of throughput. How is that not fast enough for a freaking photo application? For Apple not to test/support this use case is inexcusable.
    - coder543 4y ago
      Modern external hard drives are more like 120MB/s, not "several hundred" MB/s, last I checked, but that's only for sequential access. Scanning and accessing a photo library is extremely random I/O and has nothing to do with the peak sequential throughput. Hard drives are awful at random I/O. If Apple kept proper indexes and thumbnails somewhere (especially somewhere fast, like on an SSD), maybe it would be fine, but I have heard some bad things about Apple Photos on hard drives, so they might not be doing things optimally.
      - compiler-guy 4y ago
        The pain many people experience with using external hard drives and Apple photos is photos building that index and those thumbnails. Huge amounts of io that apparently need to be rebuilt constantly [1]. Probably also happens on SSDs, but you can’t tell because you can’t hear. 1. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251365140 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251365140 And many, many like it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ehutch79 4y ago
"I understand that the way I set things up doesn't jive with your workflow. So I'm going to just step back, and let you take care of things exactly how you like. Just keep in mind that I'll be hands off no matter what."