#weeklyreview 12/2025
Last week was a lot of fiddling around with my Mac. Decided to have macOS on an external SSD that I can boot from. So that I can have an almost physical separation between my private macOS and my corporate macOS using the very same hardware.
First decision was which type of SSD. I’ve got an SATA-to-USB adapter with an old Crucial SSD that I tried the approach first with. Worked reasonable well. Although the SSD itself probably can only do 450 MB/s read/write. The macBook internal NVMe SSD can probably do ~ 6 GByte/s according to this reddit post.
While the USB SATA SSD worked reasonably well, I anyway wanted to have a larger capacity and also better speed. Choice was between an USB 3.2 model where the USB port could theoretically transfer up to 10 Gbit/s or go for USB 4 which apparently goes up to 40 Gbit/s. Also which make of the disk. Briefly considered the Sandisk Extreme Portable NVMe SSDs. They are durable and affordable at good speed. Only drawback is their product quality issues. Some badges seem to have bad solder and tend to fail. So I settled with a Samsung T7 2TB NVMe SSD. That only does USB 3.2 but for normal day-to-day work I do not feel any speed difference over the internal SSD. An USB4 model would just be a waste of money for no noticeable gain in my eyes.
Advantage of the Samsung disk is, that it’s small and with an aluminium casing. On heavy usage, these SSDs tend to get warm and thermal management might slow them down. The aluminium finish allows for attaching heat sinks if need be I figured. The Sandisk with their plastic and rugged exterior is probably harder to cool passively.
Google Takeout
I also finished to download my most recent Google Takeout. That’s where you can get a download of all your data on your Google Account. You can choose which services to include. I mainly care about my photos in Google Photos which I use as a convenient backup of my phones camera roll. Over the years I’ve collect about 2TB of data.
Downloading and moving this amount of data is not trivial. Google offers to archive in chunks of 10 to 50 GB as ZIP or Tar.GZ files. After I triggered the takeout it took about 2-3 hours for them to compile the archive and send me a links with the individual downloads. For the 10 GB chunks size that were 203 individual files. I created a second takeout with 50 GB chunks size and tried to download that. Unfortunately the chunks didn’t fit on my machines disk at first. So I had to clean up a little. Tried on other computers etc. Just to find out that after a certain amount of attempts the downloads are blocked on the Google side. Apparently a security feature. 
OK, then I went with the 10 GB chunks instead. Those I hadn’t tried that often yet. Took me two days on the office network and home to download all the chunks and store them on my external 4TB USB drive.
To unpack the data I needed another large external USB drive to receive the more than 2TB. Unpacking all the TAR.GZ archives took my Macbook several hours. The limiting factor here was the USB transfer speed of the two physical hard disks.
Next challenge will be to sort unpacked images into my usual naming and folder scheme and then sync it with the data I already have local on my NAS. That will probably also take a couple of days each. Still have to develop a plan to do that on one my spare Linux machines to not block my Mac for several days in place. That amount of data you don’t just transfer over your home WiFi. The machines need to stay connected via cabled LAN and the Disks attached via USB.
Beer & Burger
On Wednesday we finally had our spring session of the legendary beer and burger crew. This time we befell the Burgeramt in Berlin Friedrichshain. Nice location, funny staff and good burgers. Easily a 7/10 for the venue. 15/10 for the crew of course.