To buy or not to buy, that is the question. DevonThink needs more Resources

I have a late October 2013 MacBook Pro with an OWC 1 TB hard drive and 16 GB of memory.

My Mac was solid until I installed a OWC 1TB Hard drive a couple of years ago.

It became just a little glichy. I recently purchased the Thunderbay 4 Raid Enclosure and mentioned that the drive I purchased a couple of years ago was never quite right. I was so pleased that they replaced it as they admitted that there were some drives with problems.

When I run my regular suite of apps, mostly no problem, but when I add in some bigger apps I tend to get crashes.

Specifically Photos but more often DEVONthink

I think that it might be lack of memory.

I am tiried of waiting. I was waiting for the 14 in MBP now I am waiting on the new Apple Silicon systems. Arrggg

I was thinking of a Used 16in MBP 16 GB Memory, 512 Disk that I could use for a year and then resell. I am guessing that it would cost me about $750. $2500 to Buy, 1750 to Sell. Or less if the Apple based systems take off.

I have a lot of Apps and customizations. It could take me 32 Hours just to set up the 16in.

I would only like to do that once.

I hate the apple tax but I suppose that I could just bite the bullet and get the intel system that I want now but it would probably be worth a lot less 3 years from now.

One the other side I am worried about how long it will take to get the apps I use to be ported. If I were an IT manager I would probably be planning on upgrading Aug-Nov next year 2021. I am retired but managing several Real Estate Investments.

Right now, I think that if I could count on the new systems this year I could hold out and by just moving the apps that are ready to the new system I might be able to effectively run DevonThink on my MBP 2012 if it is not ready for the new chips.

Thanks for letting me talk thru this. I think that I will wait for the new systems and migrate what is available.

As an aside,

I was reading up on Thunderbolt and they mentioned that you could set up a network using the Thunderbolt ports. At 40GB per second and a little remote desktop it would seem to me that you could have a pretty fast system made up of 2 systems.

Has anyone actually used Thunderbolt to network 2 Macs

Do you still have your oem drive?
Now that you have more external storage, you might get by with less internal storage, and The oem drive could give you stability back.

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Good idea, I did not think of that, but I don’t think I can fit all of my apps on a 256MB disk.

You can run apps from an external drive too.
Not sure how picky your particular apps are about where they live.

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Your comment sparked a call to OWC. They are going to send me a drive that they test before sending out. If I still have problems I am going to try your suggestion.

Just how do you move iCloud, Users and Apps to a external drive.

Besides the system files, What does Apple insist be on the System disk.

Do you have to use an alias to move users off of the system drive?

I guess that I could move off what I can then just duplicate the disk back to the 256 Drive.

I’m sure OWC will try to make it right.
I tried one of their drives and got a lot of kernel panics. I wound up returning it and going with a Fledgling Feather drive.

Here is some discussion on moving things to an external drive. Googling around should turn up more.