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I Had to Expand the External Storage on My Secondary Mac Mini

I first wrote about this Mac and its setup here — and then I have an update here. However, quite quickly, I learned that the 2 TB of storage I had purchased wasn’t enough.

The main culprit is Time Machine — and while I could probably do something to minimise the usage, backing up my wife’s MacBook Air (512 GB) and my MacBook Pro (512 GB) currently takes up about 1.1 TB.

I was considering upgrading the internal storage on the Mac, as more and more options for this gets released. However, none of my use-cases for storage benefits from being internal — so I did something else.

New hardware

So, I previously only had a 2 TB SSD 🖇️ in a Satechi Thunderbolt enclosure 🖇️. And here’s what I did:

  1. I purchased a (cheaper and slower) Satechi USB-C enclosure 🖇️, and a 4 TB SSD 🖇️.
  2. Then I moved the old 2 TB SSD over to the slower USB-C enclosure,
  3. and slipped the new 4 TB drive into the faster Thunderbolt enclosure.
The two enclosures, opened up.
Swapping the drives was fast and easy.
Open again, but showing the lids as well. Thermal padding on the USB-C SSD, and on the enclosure of the TB.
Both enclosures shipped with a thermal pad. Especially useful on the Thunderbolt variant – that thing gets warm. It can't be placed on the enclosure on the USB-C variant. However, it doesn't have a lot of adhesive, so it's fine.
Closed up, next to each other. The USB-C is about one third the size.
The Thunderbolt one comes with a plastic cover.
A noticeable size difference (also in thickness, which I forgot to take a picture of). The plastic cover is supposed to help with the heat.
Cables attached. They both have short ones.
The black one for the USB-C one is a bit longer. It's practical that they're not the same colour.

Software tweaks

I kept the Time Machine backups on the (now) slow 2 TB, and moved everything else to the fast 4 TB. “Everything” in this context was:

  • My Dropbox folder, synced with Maestral
  • (which includes my Jellyfin library)
  • our iCloud Photo Library, and its backup,
  • some more random backup stuff,
  • my Steam library,
  • my MailMate folder,
  • and my default folder for installing large App Store apps (not that I have any) and games through the Heroic launcher.

One thing gave me an issue, though…

My 2 TB drive had the name Satechi SSD. But as I now had two of those, I renamed it to Satechi C-SSD – and I named the new one Satechi TB-SSD. However, Time Machine didn’t enjoy me changing the name of the target location. So I had to set it up again – an even though I pointed to the old backups, I think it reset itself. In other words, I lost my (not too deep) file history.

One hour later…

All-in-all, everything went fine – and it didn’t take long. And I think this little journey shows the pros of the flexibility offered by using enclosures instead of “regular” external drives.