Thunderbolt External Drives & Windows
Hi everyone;
I'm looking for a bit of advice.
Last week, I switched out my 2012 Macbook Pro, with a 2013 "retina" MBP. The new machine is awesome, but the SSD it has is significantly smaller than the mechanical drive I had in my old machine.
For the most part, this is no problem. The challenge however, is very occasionally I need to use a couple of Windows applications. On my old MBP, I just had Parallels and Windows installed on the internal hard drive. It wasn't a problem, because the drive was huge. Now, I don't really want to give up a fairly large chunk of my new SSD to something that I use so infrequently.
What I'm wondering is, if I get a Thunderbolt drive, just to have Parallels and Windows on it, will that work, and will the performance be OK? I've read that the Thunderbolt interface is blazingly fast, so I think it might be, but thought I'd see if anyone had experience with this setup.
Comments
Did you know they might be updating them tomorrow? The 2013 revision months ago was just a mild spec bump. The next update will move to the new Haswell processor architecture for longer battery life and if it's the same deal as the Air, will either offer more storage for the same price or drop in price. I have a feeling they will try to cut the price by $200-300 in order to eliminate the old models, which would have allowed you to move up to 512GB for around the same price as your current model. You might be within a return period that will allow you to take it back and get the new one if they do get updated.
Yes Thunderbolt is fine for this. Another option you can consider is an SD card. They can actually be faster than a hard drive:
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Class-Memory-SDSDXS-032G-AFFP/dp/B00DN43UHU
They aren't as reliable for long term use but for an occasionally used virtual machine, it would be a viable option.
Thanks Marvin.
Yeah, I know they are likely to bump them tomorrow, but the retina Mac I got I found just sat in our store cupboard at work (we always have a bunch of laptops sat ready for someone to use if theirs breaks, I decided to bag this one and leave my old one as a "loaner"), so we've owned it for a while.
Appreciate the feedback. I'd not thought about using an SD card. Since I have a 64Gb card in my bag right now, I'll give it a bash!