MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Pros & Cons of storing library on mac's SSD vs. storing on external drive?

stumped · 04-09-2020, 02:54 AM

in normal use, addding, editing...books I doubt you would see any speed difference between an internal drive and an external USB drive. especially if you have usb 3
a one off copy of an entire library to another drive may take a while, but that's not a regular thing
once you have the library in 2 places you should ( as already advised) keep one as a backup. There are various free utilities that will keep the backup in sync, which will work very fast ( only the changes will update)

If you are crazy about speed, put a SSD into a USB3 caddy. Read speeds on those are ~5x faster than internal spinning drives. a 120GB SSD & a good quality caddy is cheap, nowadays. Don't skimp on the caddy, that 5$ generic one may be much much slower than the $10 branded option. In tests. i got read speeds of >400 with that setup, but I had to bin one cheap caddy where the read speed came in at 70, same as my spinning drive. Same SSD in better caddy: 400+
The other nice thing about SSD is that they are silent. If, like me, you can't abide the humming & seek noises that come from old drives, then look at upgrading all your drives. you will never want to go back...[ dunno if you can open up a mac for that though, its easy to do on a windows PC ]

04-09-2020, 02:54 AM	#3
stumped Wizard Posts: 3,305 Karma: 10259306 Join Date: May 2016 Device: kobo forma, Kobo Libra, Huawei media Tab, fire HD10, PW3 HDX8.9,	in normal use, addding, editing...books I doubt you would see any speed difference between an internal drive and an external USB drive. especially if you have usb 3 a one off copy of an entire library to another drive may take a while, but that's not a regular thing once you have the library in 2 places you should ( as already advised) keep one as a backup. There are various free utilities that will keep the backup in sync, which will work very fast ( only the changes will update) If you are crazy about speed, put a SSD into a USB3 caddy. Read speeds on those are ~5x faster than internal spinning drives. a 120GB SSD & a good quality caddy is cheap, nowadays. Don't skimp on the caddy, that 5$ generic one may be much much slower than the $10 branded option. In tests. i got read speeds of >400 with that setup, but I had to bin one cheap caddy where the read speed came in at 70, same as my spinning drive. Same SSD in better caddy: 400+ The other nice thing about SSD is that they are silent. If, like me, you can't abide the humming & seek noises that come from old drives, then look at upgrading all your drives. you will never want to go back...[ dunno if you can open up a mac for that though, its easy to do on a windows PC ] Last edited by stumped; 04-09-2020 at 02:59 AM.