I have been posting in different threads about Clean My Mac, or which Mini to buy. I had a random thought today and wanted to get feedback from the forum on whether this was a logical, efficient, economical workflow.
As mentioned before, current system is a M1/16/1TB with about 200GB remaining. Most of the space is going towards Photos, Day One, Logos, etc. Aside from doing another clean out.
Since I was thinking of upgrading my M1 because of consistent memory pressures.
Idea
M1 - only sync Photos to it and select Mac apps like Day One (less intensive apps is the idea)
M4 - becomes main computer use and offload less intense apps to the M1
I have 2 monitors connected to my m1 right now. Ideally, connect both monitors to the M4 would be the new direction, yet somehow have the M1 connected to one of the monitors (if I ever want to see 2 separate systems per screen)ā¦OR can I mount the M1 to the M4?
What am I missing?
What can go wrong?
I do have a NAS and I occasionally make a copy of my photos to the NAS. But sometimes pulling up a photo on my phone or Mac for either journaling or to share is faster with Apple.
I donāt think you are missing anything, although you canāt mount the M1 to the M4, that I know of. You can set up the M1 as a headless Mac and just screen share to it when you want to use it. My Macs both have wired connections to the network, and I can screen share to the Mini from my Studio in high performance mode and it feels like I am on that Mac, not screen sharing.
You can get boxes (KVM?) to split monitors between two computers, but I have never tried that.
My Mini is not headless, since I use it for things I want a monitor on it for, but I log into from my other Mac all the time. No issues at all, and itās very easy and quick to do.
Oh and another thing you do with the M1, set up be a content caching server if you own a lot of Apple devices. Supposedly if you download an update once, it will go in to the cache of the Mac server and it send it out to your other devices instead of having to redownload it for each device (if you plug iOS devices into it, they will use its network connection too). I have my Mini set up that way, but I didnāt really notice any difference in speeds doing updates this way.
I keep my Photos downloaded to the Mini, and I think it acts a server for those too. Activity monitor will show you how much data it has served, and itās doing something every day.
I used to have my Mac Mini and a work computer on the same desk and shared a monitor using a simple HDMI switching box. It worked a treat. Could you do that with one of your monitors?
Still I think you are overcomplicating things. As I remember (correctly?) you are running out of space on your Mac mini M1, mainly because you want to have your photo library local and such. You also asked in another topic to place your home folder on an external drive.
But what is the reason that you donāt want put your big files and maybe the photo library on an external drive?
If you want to upgrade to an M4, then I would do that, and still go with an external drive. As I see it, I wouldnāt go the 2 Mac mini routeā¦
I donāt have a desktop Mac, but I have a total of 35TB connected as external storage, together with an external monitor to my MacBook Air via a hub. MacBook on the go and in the couch for surfing, reading, work, etc but when I am on the desk I connect one cable via USB-C to my clamshelled MacBook and everything is there.
I have thought about moving the Photos library to another drive and the reason I havenāt is because it can cause problems. If the drive unmounts for some reason, as drives tend to do in macOS, it can cause syncing issues once the drive is reconnected. I am sure itās not a huge issue, but every time I read about someone doing this, there is always a ābutā as to the drawbacks. Since this is one of those things I donāt want to think about, and I have Macs with free space sitting around, I donāt do it.
If I ever go with the OWC RAID enclosure for external storage, I might try it though. I just canāt afford Appleās SSD prices anymore.
What I would do (and have done for about 15 years) is run the old mini headless. Just put it out of the way in a corner. Hang external drives on it as necessary. Currently Iāve got 17TB external and 1TB internal on an M1 Mac mini.
My worry has been the disconnect of the external drives. Right now I have 2 Samsung T7 connected to my M1. One runs CCC each night and one manages TM. Every single morning I have the same message that I am greeted with. Task could not be completed because of the drive unmounting. I click the TM icon and it begins doing the backup again. Also Iāve noticed the TM drive unmounts more frequently than the CCC. Until I can figure out why that behavior keeps happening and how to stop it Iām hesitant putting things like my photo library on an external drive solely. Yes, I will add backup tasks for that external as well, but thatās just one more task on the list now.
I can understand that. The only time Iāve had regular unmounts, it was the drive which was dieing. That shouldnāt be the case with what I suspect are relatively new Samsung T7s.
I have a T7 as well, it unmounts about once a week. But this has always happened on Macs for as long as I can remember, drives just unmount sometimes (they do on Windows too). Some macOS versions are worse than others. My Synology never does, but external SSD/HDD do. My theory is the Mac sleeping/waking is where the problems happen.
I know itās a sleeping problem on my MBP. On battery power it will go to sleep in the middle of a backup and then I get the error that Time Machine couldnāt complete because the drive disconnected.
My Synology does this weird thing where when I am 5-6 folders deep in Finder working on something. It just kicks me back out to the root again. Iām not sure if thatās the ādisconnectā or not. It doesnāt happen frequent enough for me to worry and when it does happen, usually when I am working on something, not when Mac sleeps/wakes. I might have to revisit the wiring.
I might as well upgrade the M4 with the 10 gigabit ethernet.
As far as upgrade goesā¦I think the M4 Pro might be overkill considering that it looks like I would probably upgrade again in another 4 years (based on M1 to M4) unless some crazy breakthrough in technology in happens.
This is the way! I use Remote Desktop for managing my headless Mac mini that happens to work as a media center and itās more than fine. Well, itās not headless because itās connected to the TV, but for admin work yeah, itās headless.
One caveat: for this to be effective, OP would need to carefully consider what goes into the headless Mac mini. IMHO itās not āless intense appsā, I would say itās āas many CPU/disk intensive appsā as the M1 can cope with because a) the M1 is not underpowered and b) you want to stay most of the time in the newer M4.
I find this rather curious. Iām sure it happens, as multiple folks here have reported it. But like @geoffaire the only time Iāve had issues with drives is when the drive is failing.
At the risk of jinxing myself, I currently have twelve external drives, eight in two OWC enclosures and four individual, connected to my Mac Studio. A mix of spinning disks and SSDs. And Iāve been using multiple external drives with prior Macs as well (2010 Mac Pro, 2018 Mini). And I do not recall any issues with them unmounting.
A puzzlement for sure.
Variables to consider:
Are the drives directly connected or through a hub?
Are the drives directly powered or do they draw power from the Mac?
Could it be an issue with the T7?
Iām sure other folks will have further suggestions
One recent behavior Iāve found in macOS is that powerd will signal the āExternalMediaā assertion when external media is mounted, disabling sleep. As a matter of fact, I have my Photo library in an external drive that happens to be connected to my Mac mini inside a Sateshi hub (so I donāt really need to disconnect it) but the always ongoing activities on the disk itself due to photoanlysis basically makes it unmountable, so my Mini usually doesnāt go to sleep.
But it always happens in the middle of the night, and you computer is set so it can sleep?
Although, sleep/wake cycles can cause issues, but I know some people have tons of issues with docks as well.
One thing I have learned from this forum, something that I think is a common issue, someone will say āthat has never happened to me.ā
To be clear, I have never had a drive that does it every night. My last HDD TM drive would unmount maybe twice a year, but it was a thing that could happen.
Given the complexity of these systems and the different hardware and software combinations, thatās not surprising. And I find it helpful to know that an issue Iām having may not be normal, so that it makes sense to continue to trouble shoot.
And Iāve had issues that no-one else seemed to experience. I had an issue that my 2018 Mini would crash and reboot upon shutdown, every time. I never got it sorted, but it stopped when I switched to the Studio and disconnected most everything from the Mini. So I understand the frustration.
As to docks, I had one that was very problematic. I forget the make and model, and it has long made its way to a landfill. But it caused issues with things connecting (card readers, scanners, webcams) as well as interfering with Bluetooth.
Perhaps change the backup schedule and try it during the day and see if this makes a difference.
