Increase Mac Storage Options

Four ways to increase Mac storage. 1) Internal SSD upgrade - works on Mac mini 2010-2012, iMac 2009-2019, MacBook Pro Retina 2013-2015, and a few other older models. Apple silicon MacBooks and iMacs have soldered storage that cannot be upgraded; the Mac Studio and Mac Pro use Apple storage modules that only take matching Apple parts. 2) External Thunderbolt 4 SSD - best for Apple silicon: real-world 2,800-3,000 MB/s (near internal speed), usually cheaper per terabyte than a bigger Apple configuration. 3) USB-C external SSD (USB 3.2) - slower than Thunderbolt 4 (~1,000 MB/s) but cheaper.

Good for archives, mediocre for active projects. 4) iCloud Drive or third-party cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, Backblaze) - useful for offsite backup and access from multiple devices but slow for active use; depends on your internet. For most Apple silicon users, a TB4 external SSD plus iCloud is the right combo. We sell and install both at our Dubai workshops.

Intel iMacs are the exception to soldered storage: most can take a new internal drive, as set out under iMac SSD upgrade.

The upgrade requests we get at the Media City office split evenly between older Intel machines and Apple silicon owners. For the Intel group, the 2015 MacBook Pro and the 2017 and 2019 iMacs are the sweet spot: the drive is a proprietary blade and an adapter plus a normal NVMe drive works, with the caveat that pre-2017 machines need a firmware update first or they will not boot from NVMe. The 2019 iMac is harder because the screen is glued on and comes off with a wheel cutter, so it is a bench job.

For Apple silicon owners we do two things that most do not think of. We check whether the internal drive is actually full of a dormant Photos library and iMessage attachments, which often recovers 100 GB, and we set up the external with a proper Time Machine exclusion so the backup is not copying the archive back onto itself.