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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

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.

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.