[jen729w]

> Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data.

You have backups though, so who cares? Your motherboard died, you need a new computer anyway. Do a restore. And it’s not like external drives can’t fail; they’re just tiny computers.

> It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap)

Hard disagree, friend. Example: my editing software has a ‘cache’ folder. If I set it on the external drive and that drive isn’t mounted for whatever reason, the software defaults back to ~/Movies. The first you know of this is the system notifying you that you have 20MB of hard drive space left.

There’s no substitute for an always-there-no-matter-what internal drive.

[precommunicator]

Nothing beats the convenience of unplugging a drive and plugging it to a next computer and it just works, within seconds you have everything ready for work.

[bpye]

Is there a good file system for this? For macOS I’d want APFS, for Linux ext4, Windows NTFS (maybe ReFS?). You can typically get read only access between them, and I know Linux can do RW with NTFS - but I’m not aware of a good option.

[jen729w]

exFAT? It’s not perfect but it’s widely compatible.

[jen729w]

Well, kinda! But not really.

I'm living this right now. I just switched laptops with my partner as she's doing a bunch of video editing. So she got my Pro and I'm using her Air. (I know, I'm an amazing boyfriend.)

So yeah, great, I have all my files. But none of my apps! And I'm not signed in to any of my websites. And even if the apps I use were on this laptop I'm not licensed for them. Oh and I have to get my password manager before I can do any of this. And configure my email.

Conservatively, it takes a couple of hours to restore minimal state. I know, I just did it!

In that time I could have connected an Ethernet cable and copied all of my data between the two internal SSDs. :-)

Edit: oh yeah, and I just command-strip-attached the SanDisk SSD to the back of this laptop's monitor. Because otherwise when I go and work somewhere else I'm trailing this umbilical around with me. This setup is absurd and I hate it!

Edit2: oh yeah again, now this external drive is constantly occupying fully 50% of my USB ports. Terrific.