• Mac Boot Camp Drivers
• Mac Mini Boot Camp External Drive Recovery
• Boot Camp On Mac
• Mac Mini Boot Camp External Drive Reviews

By William Gallagher
Friday, April 12, 2019, 12:27 pm PT (03:27 pm ET)

Today's SSD drives are so fast that they speed up your entire Mac —but unless you spend a lot of money, they're also very small. You can manage on 128GB of space instead, but it takes discipline and apps to pull it off.

Jun 22, 2013  Connect the external drive or device to the Mac Reboot the Mac and after the startup chime hold down the OPTION key during boot until you see the boot selection menu Click the external volume to boot from it You will find that external drives typically are shown with an orange icon, with their interface printed on the icon itself.

Oct 09, 2013 Question: Q: How to run Boot Camp on External Hard Drive? I use my mid-2012 11' MacBook Air for gaming and school work. My hard drive is filling up fast, and I was hoping I could use an external hard drive and Boot Camp to run Windows for my games, thus freeing up most of my hard drive. Mac os boot camp download. Aug 13, 2019 Format a USB flash drive. To install the latest Windows support software, you need a 16GB or larger USB flash drive formatted as MS-DOS (FAT). Start your Mac from macOS. Plug the USB flash drive into your Mac. Open Disk Utility, which is in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder. I have a Mac Mini 2018 128gb SSD. I regret purchasing the smallest hard drive, especially since now I'd like to use bootcamp. I tried to bootcamp and it left me with about 10gb of space. Ozone 8 vst free download. First I considered using a standard SSD to offload some MacOS apps to gain some space. But I am now looking. R/macmini: The Apple Mac mini. External SSD for Mac Mini. I have a 2018 Mini, and I intentionally bought the 512GB SSD with the thought of getting an external drive later on. I plan on using the internal drive only for programs, and then putting working files, Dropbox, etc on the external. And made a Boot camp on external drive thanks. I have a 2018 Mini, and I intentionally bought the 512GB SSD with the thought of getting an external drive later on. I plan on using the internal drive only for programs, and then putting working files, Dropbox, etc on the external.

There's no question: the more storage you have on your Mac, the happier you'll be. Yet it's easy to say that a decent minimum is a 512GB SSD, it's harder to actually buy that.
You have to specify your drive size when you're buying the Mac and you have to get it from Apple. That means both predicting what you'll ever need with this machine —and paying well for it. A 512GB SSD adds $400 to the cost of a Mac mini, or practically half the price of the machine again.
A 1TB SSD is the same cost as a Mac mini, if you get it from Apple. And if you're buying a MacBook Air, getting it with a 512GB SSD will make that cheapest Mac laptop cost $1,599.
You get the same or at least similar price issues with machines like the higher-cost, higher-spec iMac or MacBook Pro. And if you're used to having a couple of terabytes of spinning hard drives on your old Mac, even a 512GB SSD is going to feel cramped.
On the one hand, though, that SSD is going to make your Mac feel faster than ever. If you have a Mac with a small drive —or one with just a lot less than you're used to —then you're going to have to change how you use that machine. There are, as ever, apps that can help you. There are settings that will be of use.
More than anything, however, you're going to need discipline.

Discipline

There are certain things you have to have on your Mac's internal drive, on its startup disk. There are others where through years of habit you think you have to have there. And then there are ones you don't.
As soon as you can, buy external drives. It's another outlay but it's vastly cheaper than paying Apple for a bigger SSD. Get at least two, and train yourself to move documents to both when you're done with them.

Archive everything when it doesn't need to be on your boot drive. And if you can keep those drives permanently connected to your Mac, online services like Backblaze will back them up exactly as if they're your internal drive.
And, Thunderbolt 3 is very fast, with theoretical maximums of 40 gbit/sec. Don't be afraid to get an external USB 3.1 type C drive capable of 10 gbit/sec for things you need fast access from, like for Photoshop scratch files, or the like.

Little choice

It's best to assume that applications must stay on your startup drive. That's not entirely true, but for the great majority of applications, it is safest and wisest.
However, apps tend to use temporary space on your drive. If you're editing video in any app, for instance, you're going to get a low disk space warning very quickly because of this.
Check the app to see if you can have this temporary space on another drive, though. Final Cut Pro X, for example, lets you set any drive as the place for these temporary files. It will always be faster to be using your startup drive, but if the external is an SSD then the difference may not be noticeable.

FCPX makes this easy but you can also do it with iTunes, which doesn't.
It's well worth the effort it takes to move iTunes's libraries to another drive, but right now you should probably wait. It looks likely that Apple will split up iTunes into its constituent parts, separating music and video for instance. And while the technique for moving them to an external drive will be the same, you may decide you only want to do this for, say, books.

Apps to help get a grip

If you're struggling right now with a drive that is complaining about how little room you've got left, use some apps to help you get a handle on it.
OmniDiskSweeper, for instance, is a very good and free utility from the makers of OmniFocus. It catalogues your drive and gives you a quick way to see what's taking up space - and delete it, if you choose. It's not for people who are new to the Mac, but it's a great tool if you know you shouldn't ever delete your Library.
For newer uses or just when you haven't time to study every document's file size, you can use Gemini. This app, included in Setapp, is a duplicate file finder and it's peculiar how easily you end up with two or more copies of the same thing.

Apps to stay on top

Once you've got a decent amount of space on your drive, the most useful thing you can do is plan. Make a workflow for yourself, just a list of when you do what with your documents. Figure out when you are done with them and when you can archive them off.
Then think about downloads. Your downloads folder already has too many files in it and because you haven't looked in a year, you can't easily tell now what's important and what isn't.
So plan to delete or archive every download after you've downloaded it.

And if this all seems like too much trouble, it is —but you can get Hazel to help. Hazel is a reason to buy a Mac, it's that good and useful. It monitors any folder you tell it to, and then it takes action on what it finds.
We have Hazel monitor our desktop for invoices which it archives off for us after a day. After a month, Hazel will collect up all the images we've created and not only move them to an external archive but rename and sort them to make it easy to find one later.

Archive or delete

There's genuinely no question. If you have a Mac with a small drive then you are going to have to be conscious of what you Save and where you save it.
Yet if our Macs today come with smaller drives than we're used to, they're fantastically faster. If you move from an old iMac to a new Mac mini, well, you'll likely miss the screen as well as the storage space, but you'd never go back either.
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By William Gallagher
Tuesday, January 15, 2019, 12:32 pm PT (03:32 pm ET)

Apple's security processor gets in the way when you're trying to use external drives to boot from. Fix this now because if you wait until you need to restart from one, you'll have problems.


The T2 chip that Apple has been adding to new Macs does many things to help your computer be more secure —but one of them is an issue. By default, Macs with the T2 processor will not boot from an external drive. That's fine, that's even good, but it's an inconvenience when you want to do it. Then if the reason you want to boot from an external drive is a catastrophic failure of your internal one, it's a problem.
Apple doesn't see it like that. The company believes we all have great online connections all the time and so the official advice would be to boot from the recovery partition over the internet. Even if you can definitely do that, it's a help for troubleshooting problems. If what you really need is to carry on working, then you will have created a clone of your troublesome drive yet will not be able to boot from it.
Then just to double down on how this good security system can also be a pain, there's the issue of the keyboard. To convince your Mac to boot from an external drive, you have to first restart into macOS Recovery and that requires you to hold down Command-R as the machine boots. Only, if you have a wireless keyboard, the restarting Mac may not recognize it.
Truly, if you're booting from an external then it's to solve some problem, not to find others. So take a minute to fix this now, before you have to.

It will only get worse and also better

Mac Boot Camp Drivers

At time of writing, the Apple T2 Security Chip is in the iMac Pro plus models of the Mac mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro that were launched in 2018. You can take it for granted that it will appear in all Macs eventually.
If, for any reason, you're not sure whether the Mac in front of you has the T2 processor, you can check through System Information. Hold down the Option key as you select the Apple menu and where you normally see About this Mac, you'll see System Information

Mac Mini Boot Camp External Drive Recovery

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Choose that and then in the window that appears, click on Controller in the left-hand list. If the Mac has a T2 chip, it will say so here.

If your machine has it then the default is that it will not allow you to boot from external drives. Before you go fixing that, however, take a moment to check whether anyone already has.
Plug in an external drive that you know is bootable. Go to System Preferences and Startup Disk. Click the padlock and enter your password, then try to choose that external drive to boot from.

You will get the same information if you're using an app such as Carbon Copy Cloner. This utility lets you automatically create a bootable copy of your current drive so that in the event of any problems, you can simply swap straight over. Ordinarily Carbon Copy Cloner will tell you that the new cloned drive will be bootable, but with T2's default settings, it can't.
Instead it will show a warning triangle and when you click on that, you get the fuller explanation.

Boot Camp On Mac

This is particularly significant because there are other reasons why a cloned drive may not be bootable. Apps like Carbon Copy Cloner may not be able to tell you that there's a problem because it only sees that the T2 is preventing booting. So you could be regularly creating a clone drive and only find that it doesn't work when you need it.

So fix it

Plug in a wired keyboard. Restart the Mac and hold down the Command and R keys until you see the Apple logo.
Let go of the keys while the Mac goes through the rest of this special startup sequence. Instead of the regular desktop or login windows, it will bring you to the macOS Recover screen which lists options such as recovering from a Time Machine backup.
You don't want any of the options on the the Recover screen. Instead, choose the Utilities menu and click on Startup Security Utility.

You'll have to enter your password to launch it, but then when you do, you're presented with three types of option to do with firmware passwords, secure boot —and lastly, External Boot.
This will be set to Disallow such booting but you can click on the button beneath to change that to Allow

Mac Mini Boot Camp External Drive Reviews

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Choose Allow, then quit the utility. You're taken back to the macOS Recovery window. Click the red close button at top left and lastly you'll be asked about restarting.
Click on Choose Startup Disk and then pick any bootable drive you've got attached. The Mac will restart and it will boot from that drive.
It will now boot from any drive you connect over USB or Thunderbolt so you can keep an emergency clone ready to go at any time. Now you've done all this, take the time to create a backup that regularly maintains a clone of your bootable drive.
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