Qustions about solutions for Mid 2012 Macbook Pro with Retina Display running out of hard drive space.....

Hello Everyone,

I have a Mid 2012 Retina MBP that I uses as my "portable" workstation. I don't store media (such as movies or music) on it, and only have one game on it (Rocksmith). The largest portions of disk space are dedicated to my VMWare Fusion Windows 7 VM (with development environment) and the 3D work files used for Carrara. I just went below the 50% mark, and am starting to get nervous...... I tried copying my VM (which is 60GBs by itself) to an external USB drive, but performance (and the bulkiness of having to connect an external drive) was unsatisfactory. So, I am thinking about getting one of those "short" SD cards and trying to shuffle data to it. However, I was wondering what some others have done in this regard.. Is the performance of a Class 10 SD card sufficient to run a VM from, what about moving the entire Home folder to it? Would it be better to try and just move documents to it (I could probably move the OneDrive syncing which is 4 GBs and the Carrara Library which currently is around 18 GBs).

Thanks in advance!

 

Get more space.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD...-MacBook-Pro-Retina-2012-Drive-Internal-Flash

 

Documents maybe but it is WAY too slow for a VM or for most peoples home folders

 

These are much better replacement drives than the ones from OWC.

 

Howdy S.SubZero and Saturnotaku,

Thanks for the reply, however this is not an option, as it would void my AppleCare warranty. I am half tempted to just order the JetDrive Lite, and give it a try. It is decent price (compared to what I am seeing locally) for a 128 GB SD card. The best case (in my opinion) would to be able to move the VMWare fusion image to it, and run it from there. However, based on what KCETech1 said, it doesn't sound like it is a good idea. I do think I would not have a problem moving the sync location for OneDrive, and putting my Carrara library on it. While researching this before posting my question here, I saw some folks talk about actually installing and booting OS X on an SD card, and it working "ok." I did try to move my VM image to an external USB 2.0 drive, but found that it was too slow for use. Thanks!

Rich S.

 

One thing about SD cards: they aren't really made for OS type I/O and you could kill the card faster than you may think. Secondly, you'd need to determine how the card reader is hooked internally. I've seen readers hooked to USB2.0 internall even when USB3.0 or PCI-E were available. It doesn't really matter how fast the SD card is if it's internally limited to USB 2.0 speeds. Now, for data that is mostly static, it makes for good extra storage.

USB 3.0 is faster, the USB protocol isn't the best for having an OS on it, but you'll still get better performance out of a USB 3.0 drive. Definitely far from ideal, but not nearly as bad as USB 2.0.

Thunderbolt would likely give you the best performance, but thunderbolt enclosures/external drives ain't exactly cheap, so that'll depend on your budget. Again, it won't be ideal, but it should offer the best performance as far as external storage is concerned.

EDIT: Looking at what Carrara does, you may not want the library on slow speed storage media either. That is something you'd have to test.

 

Not if you keep the original SSD with a full installation of OS X on it that you can swap back into your machine should it need to go in for service. The Transcend drive comes with an external enclosure that can would allow you to clone the original.

Also, as tijo said, an SD card is not designed to handle the IO demands of having a full operating system on it. Thunderbolt is the ideal solution in this instance, but an external USB 3.0 hard drive or SSD would work as well if you're cash strapped.

 

Hi Tijo and Saturnotaku,

Thanks for the replies Transcend is marketing the JetDrive Lite as not an SD card, see their FAQ:
What is the difference between JetDrive Lite (JDL) and a normal SD card? Is it safe to store data in a JDL? - Service & Download

They don't talk about running VMs on their website, but just expanding your storage. They specifically mention that they don't recommend using it as a System Disk:
Can we install windows system in JetDrive Lite? - Service & Download

They do mention using it as a Time Machine Target:
Can we use Time Machine to back up data? - Service & Download

My drive should be here today. I am going to experiment with it, and see how it goes. I'll post a summary here in a few days. Thanks again everyone!

Rich S.

 

Let us know how it works out, even if it turns out to be a bust, at least it'll help others knowing it.

 

Hi Everyone,

I got the JetDrive Lite (Model 350 128 GB) yesterday, and have been testing it out since then. I installed it into my RMBP and have proceeded to move my VMWare Fusion Windows 7 VM, iPhoto LIbrary and iTunes Media to it. Performance for my VM is noticeably slower. I had a "default" setup of 1 Processor Core and 2 GBs of RAM, and it had performed fine when run from the internal SSD. Moving it to the JetDrive I noticed massive swapping due to high RAM usage. I have nothing but my own observations to back this up, so take it as you will, but I think the biggest performance issue using the JetDrive is the limited number of read/write operations available at the same time. When the VM is swapping to disk (due to high RAM usage), the whole system slows to a crawl as it hits the JetDrive. If I attempt to copy files to the JetDrive while the VM is running from the Mac desktop, it slows. Any disk heavy operation is painfully slow on the VM. However, just doing normal desktop things it isn't too bad. I upped the RAM to 3 GBs, to help alleviate some of the swapping which seems to help. It seems the performance of the Mac SSD hide the performance penalty of "disk thrashing" in Windows LOL. In fact, I am typing this reply in my Windows 7 VM, running form the JetDrive. This website crashes under Safari on my Mac for some reason.....

As I get more info, I'll share in case this info helps others

Rich S.

 

If you can do so from OS X, could you run a benchmark on the overall performance of the JDL when the VM isn't running?