How to put iCloud Photos and Dropbox on an external SSD

I’m in the middle of renovating my home office for 2025 and this time it’s not only about moving some furniture around but also upgrading some hardware. I’ve retired my trusty M1 MacBook Air and bought an almost-base M4 Mac Mini to which I connected an external 4TB SSD drive for storing both all the photos and all of my Dropbox files. Here’s how:

• How to store full iCloud Photos Library on an external SSD
• How to synchronize Dropbox files with an external SSD
• Which M4 Mac Mini?
• Which SSD drive?

How to store full iCloud Photos Library on an external SSD

One of the reasons of having a Mac in my home office is that it plays a complementary role to my main computer - M4 iPad Pro. It backs up all of my family photos and videos locally in full resolution. However, all these memories take space and the space will only increase, so I wanted to make sure I can set up a Photo Library on an external SSD drive. I basically followed Apple documentation step by step:

1. In Finder, I opened my home folder and went to the Pictures folder where the “Photos Library” is.
2. I drag and drop this “Photos Library” with CMD to move it to my SSD drive. It asks me for my main password to confirm.
3. Now I open the just-moved “Photos Library” with double click and go to Settings (CMD+,)
4. I press the button to “Use as System Photo Library”
5. I go to “iCloud” in the Settings and turn on iCloud Photos and mark “Download Originals to this Mac” (Apple: Designating a System Photo Library in Photos)

Now I just waited for all the 600+ gigs of data to download. BTW, I’m using a “Shared Photo Library” with my wife, so that we can both contribute to our family photos.

How to synchronize Dropbox files with an external SSD

I still use a paid version of Dropbox where as a team we still store lots of files and I want to make sure I have access to them locally on my Mac just in case. Also for backup purposes. However, over the years the Mac client for Dropbox has become really bloated as they try to upsell you on additional features you don’t necessarily need.

Instead of the official Dropbox client, I’m using an lightweight open-source client called Maestral and you can set it up to sync with your external SSD drive:

1. Get Maestral and install it on your Mac.
2. Open it and it’ll ask you for Dropbox API token.
3. Log in to your Dropbox in your browser and follow the link to get the token. Paste it in Maestral.
4. Choose the destination folder on your external SSD disk
5. Sync everything.

Make sure also that Maestral is added to the list of apps that starts at each log in (in “General” and “Login Items & Extensions”).

So far I’ve been using both Photos and Dropbox with my external SSD without a hitch and it’s great that I don’t have to worry about space running out.

Which M4 Mac Mini?

I actually recommend everyone get the base Mac Mini model - it’s a steal at $599 in the US, ~699 EUR in Europe or 2999 PLN in Poland.

For future-proofing I decided to go for 10 Gigabit Ethernet ($100 extra) and 512 SSD ($200 extra, I think selling a computer with 256GB is beyond ridiculous, Apple!).

However, as I see now, 10 Gigabit routers and infrastructure are still expensive (I’m thinking of maybe upgrading some of my Switches to 2.5G) and as I’m keeping both Dropbox and Photos on my external drive, I barely use the internal storage and still have 400 Gigs free. So maybe I should have gone with the base model anyway?

Apple is so stingy with their upgrades and the upgrade pricing that it’s ridiculously easy to move from $600 base price to beyond $1000 if you’re not too careful. I’m happy that thanks to Apple Intelligence we’re getting base 16GB of RAM. At least that.

Other than that, I’m in love with this Mac Mini. It’s a great little machine and I decided NOT to hang it below my desk but to keep it on the desk as a “stand” for my Mandalorian figurine:

Over the last two weeks as I was using this Mac Mini, it’s been completely quiet. Completely. I haven’t heard the fans at all in my day-to-day use.

Which SSD drive?

I bought this SSD a while back, it’s a Samsung T7 Shield portable SSD with 4TB of space (below $300 on Amazon or 1238 PLN in Poland).

Compare that to the fact, that on Apple’s web site the max storage for your Mini is 2TB and it costs a whopping $800 dollars extra. I paid $200 for 512GB internal storage + $300 for the SSD and have 4.5 TB storage now.

I’ve formatted the SSD drive into APFS (Apple File Storage) and Encrypted. This way the entire disk is encrypted and cannot be used by anyone else who doesn’t know the decryption password. It’s not the fastest disk as it gives me a little over 800MB/s write and read speeds according to the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, but for this kind of use that I’m giving it, it’s more than enough.