Anyone using aperture with an external drive?

am currently using aperture 3.5.1

My Mid 2010 MBP is filling up to capacity. I was wondering if anyone uses aperture with an external drive. I understand that you can do this. but How practical is it and how seamless is it? Specially to those photographers using MBA's with small capacity SSD's

I wanna be able to import it on the internal drive when on the go and do edits then transfer it to the external drive when at home. What becomes of the edited data? do they reside on the internal drive? Are the ones being transferred to the external drive just the orig RAW files?

It works perfectly fine. You should use a FW800 drive if you can because it will be a lot faster than your USB connection.

It's also pretty easy to replace a hard drive in the MacBook Pro. What's the capacity of your current drive?

I do this with LR and a USB 3.0 drive.

Tony-S wrote in post #16540144
It works perfectly fine. You should use a FW800 drive if you can because it will be a lot faster than your USB connection.

It's also pretty easy to replace a hard drive in the MacBook Pro. What's the capacity of your current drive?

I already upgraded mine to 750GB from the original 250GB HD. I also upgraded the RAM to 8 GB (but i think now it will support up to 16GB since the mountain lion update).

I am comfortable opening up and upgrading stuff myself.

Now I am on the crossroads of upgrading or just getting a new machine.

UPGRADE PATH: replace the HDD with an SSD and replace the optical drive with another HDD through a kit that can be purchased online. SSD with the OS and apps, the HDD with the Data.

OR

Just getting another macbook pro or air with an SSD and have the photos on the external drive.

I am not sure if the core2duo processor is even worth upgrading.... but financial constraints, you know....

I used to be a LR user but the seamlessness of the apple ecosystem between their apps is just easy.

I just use iPhoto to store photos , and use mainly aperture to do minor pp on the photos .. every approx. 100 gig I move the library to my external hard drive and start a new iPhoto library .. I'm up to iPhoto 7 now .. Going up in numbers makes it quite easy to find photos in the older iphoto libraries ..

Aperture saves/stores photos the same way iPhoto does ,but I started off years ago with iPhoto so I just never bothered changing ..

Certainly, any of the current Macs will be substantially faster than what you have now. If you can afford it, that's probably the way to go.

I use a firewire G-Drive mini which is faster than the HD inside the MBP. No problems.

I use a 3-TB external USB 3 drive as my "working drive," and another as a backup that I clone every week (carbon copy cloner). When I want to work on a project on my MBP (late-2011), I just consolidate the project from the ext to the MBP and then relocate files when I get home. Works perfectly.

So, what's your question? I'd only use an internal drive to import photos, use an external drive as a "library" drive, then another external drive as a "backup" drive...

thanks for all your replies!

a follow up question. I use time machine as my onsite back up and I have a carbonite subscription for cloud back up of my files.

If i transfer my files to the external drive, how do you guys do your back up (your work flow for back up). I know I can back up my files to carbonite but how about time machine? any other good alternatives to backing up?

Hey guys! Just an update

I have purchased a mid 2012 i7 MBP 13" with 8gb Ram. I upgraded it to a 2TB HDD as well. Been using it almost a year now.

So stubborn me still have all my stuff in one drive. lol

I just bought a 1TB SSD and I am now going to have to use an external drive for my aperture library.

I can't seem to select the projects and move those to an external drive... I seem to have to open the project and select manually individual photos then have the option to have make the file referenced somewhere...

Is there a quicker way to do this? My aperture Library is almost 600gb with almost 500 projects and growing very fast