Stephen Hackett explores what applications and files he would want to bring along if he purchased the most minimal Mac, a 11.6 MacBook Air with the stock 64GBs of solid state storage. Last September I bought the most affordable Mac, a Mac mini, and replaced its optical drive with OWC’s most affordable 40GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD. I had originally configured my Mac mini so that the operating system and major applications resided on the SSD while my Home folder and multi-gigabyte media files lived on the conventional hard drive. This configuration offered me a fast acting operating system and applications, combined with an affordable 320GBs of userland storage.

It was cheap, the Mac mini I bought for the office cost $699, and the 40GB SSD cost less than $100. It was stable, the operating system was logically divided from my Home folder. It was slower than I expected, I use my computer to write documents and create graphics and both of these activities relied on saving to the spinning disk more than accessing the speedy SSD. If I was going to upgrade my computer with an SSD I wanted the experience to be fast. I could buy a larger SSD to include both my operating system and Home folder, but the next affordable SSD that could hold both cost nearly the price of my Mac mini alone. There had to be a better solution for configuring a useful SSD equipped Mac on a budget.

I originally tried to split up my Home folder between my Mac mini’s SSD and conventional hard drive. I relocated most of my Home folder to the SSD and used symbolic links to connect the Music and Pictures folders I left behind on the conventional hard drive. This compromise gave me fast access to the operating system, applications, and files I use most, while negating my music listening and photo editing to the slow 320GB hard drive. The only problem with this particular configuration is the instability it caused with Dropbox.

The symbolic links I constructed kept my Music and Pictures folders syncing with Dropbox only as long as the second 320GB hard drive was mounted. The first time I unmounted this disk to perform a file system check Dropbox thought my Music and Pictures folders had been deleted and promptly removed those two folders from all of my other Dropbox connected computers. I couldn’t risk having my entire iTunes Msuic collection and Lightroom Library disappearing from every computer I owned the second a drive was accidentally unmounted. The best solution would be to adopt a more minimal approach.

Dropbox’s selective syncing keeps my iTunes Library and Lightroom Catalog off of my office Mac mini. Sure it disrupts my Dropbox Strategy, and weakens my Backup Strategy but often the most minimal solution is also the best. I still use the 320GB hard drive on my Mac mini for internal Time Machine backups, but I could easily swap it with the 40GB SDD and restore the optical drive I previously removed. A Mac mini with a 40GB SSD is not only the worlds most affordable Mac, it is also one of the fastest for everyday data access just as long as you can fit all your data in the first 40 gigs.