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storage

External storage: OWC Express 4M2 could be a perfect compromise

How to connect 4 NVMe SSDs to no more than 2 ports on a Mac mini? If you can accept slower transfer speeds, an OWC 4M2 can do it at a fraction of the cost.

February 9, 2026 Macs, Technology

Explainer: snapshots

Fundamentally simple: a preserved copy of a volume at a moment in time. How its size can only increase with time, how they’re managed, what they’re used for, and the tools for using them.

January 31, 2026 Macs, Technology

Explainer: Storage settings

T T Read More

It was notorious for its crashes and reporting discrepancies, but now it’s incorporated in System Settings it’s more reliable and helpful. But there’s still the problem of System Data.

December 20, 2025 Macs, Technology

Beware the full startup disk

What do you do when you discover your Mac’s Data volume has run out of free space? A guide to working with snapshots, iCloud Drive, and other tricks to salvage your Mac. And how to prevent this from happening again.

July 24, 2025 Macs, Technology

Should you pay a premium price for a bigger internal SSD?

You could save hundreds of $/€/£ buying a Mac with a smaller internal SSD. Is that a good economy, or will you come to regret it? Here are the pros and cons.

March 5, 2025 Macs, Technology

What is System Data in Storage Settings?

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The bar chart in Storage Settings shows most of your startup volume is full of System Data. What does it mean, and what use is it? Is its measure of used and free space accurate?

February 11, 2025 Macs, Technology

Why use APFS?

Deciding which file system to use for hard disks can be difficult. Here are the advantages and disadvantages explained in detail, for HFS+ and APFS.

January 9, 2025 Macs, Technology

Get better performance from network storage

Does your NAS need faster storage or a faster network? If you were to improve those, would throttling limit the performance of backups?

December 30, 2024 Macs, Technology

Why you need to make archives, and how to

Backups are for recovery, while archives are for posterity. Plan for the future now by storing important files on durable media in your personal archives.

November 1, 2024 Macs, Technology

What performance should you get from different types of storage?

How much faster should a Thunderbolt 3 SSD be for making Time Machine backups? How can you speed up backups to your NAS? Here are representative speeds from real testing.

September 10, 2024 Macs, Technology

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