I want to buy a Mac and add unlimited TB of Storage, which setup would be the best?

Unfortunately outside of the Mac Pro, none of the current Macs will allow you to upgrade the storage after purchase or in the future.

Current iMacs can be customized with up to 8TB of storage during purchase. If you need more than that, you will need to use external drives that can go much higher.

You can add unlimited storage, both rotational and SSD, with external hard drives. I have six SSDs that I use in two OWC Drive Dock with USB C connectivity.

I can remove and add additional bare SSDs depending on what I need and use them for. Three of them are for other boot systems, High Sierra, Catalina and Beta Systems. The bare SSDs come in sizes up to 4 TB.

Or if you like enclosed SSDs look at some of the external SSDs at OWC (MacSales.com).

I would suggest you get at 27" iMac with only 8 GB of RAM installed. Then upgrade the RAM yourself at about ⅓ of what it could cost to have it done by Apple at the time of purchase. For example you can add two 8 GB RAM modules from either MacSales.com or Crucial.com for a total of 24 GB about ⅓ of what it would cost to order 16 GB of RAM at the time of purchase. I would only buy from either of those two vendors.

Also get the i9 CPU for processing power. I can't make a recommendation regarding the GPU as that's above my pay grade. I just remember that one of the upgrade GPUs had given some problems with some users. You'll need to research that if a GPU change/upgrade is in your best interest.

Iwillpaywhatever wrote:

Thank you. Does it all work seamlessly?

What do you mean by "work seamlessly"?

The external drives will add hard drive icons to the Mac you can address and store things in. You'll get a new icon in Finder to place content in for each external drive or volume you add. You can navigate to them from Finder or any of the File save and load dialog boxes in apps to save or load files.

If like Toad you boot from one of those drives then it becomes the system drive, and all other drives appear as additional icons to access including the built in hard drive in the Mac.

That's as seamless as it gets.

"Unlimited" is an arbitrary concept where computers are concerned. I just purchased a new 2020 iMac with 8TB of SSD. I did that knowing that one can't really upgrade SSD storage on iMacs anymore. The new Apple Silicon Macs I suspect will no longer allow any kind of upgrades.

So that leaves you with external storage. I you plan on being the sole person using it, I suggest a Thunderbolt 3 RAID disk array. It will give you massive amounts of disk storage and very high read/write speeds at a cost that is lower than using SSD drives for the same capacity. There are cheaper NAS (Network Attached Storage) that are cheaper, but they are slower. Also, companies like OWC have Thunderbolt RAID drives, but require SoftRAID software to be installed on the computer. I'm not a fan of Software RAID. Promise uses hardware RAID which is far superior.

I use a Promise R8 (eight drives). I love it.

https://www.promise.com/Products/Pegasus/Pegasus3-Series

rkaufmann87 wrote:

I needed a lot of additional storage and purchased the 48TB version of

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/thunderbay-4/thunderbolt-3-raid-5

It works perfectly with my 2020 27" iMac.

Impressive indeed. Mr. Kauffman has money to throw around for external storage. That's more expensive than most Macs.

@Phil0124 - The OP was throwing around "unlimited" storage, so yes... that kind of storage does cost money. Folks that require this level of storage are not the usual, casual Mac owners. These folks usually use it in support of their business so that it costs more than the Mac is irrelevant.

I myself have a Promise R6 Tower (12TB) and a Promise R8 (24TB) Raid Tower, used for actual work.

Well it was a luxury as I wanted a LOT of storage, I was getting tired of JBODs so I was looking for a solution. The humorous part about it is I financed it by saving the interest from a high yield on-line savings account I had, so while it took me months to save up the money it really didn't cost a thing. I guess I could have used the interest money for something else but occasionally you need to splurge.

I have simply found that if you learn the habit of being a good saver when you are young those habits pay off when you become older.

I am stepping off my soap box now.

DeeperDiver wrote:

@Phil0124 - The OP was throwing around "unlimited" storage, so yes... that kind of storage does cost money. Folks that require this level of storage are not the usual, casual Mac owners. These folks usually use it in support of their business so that it costs more than the Mac is irrelevant.

I myself have a Promise R6 Tower (12TB) and a Promise R8 (24TB) Raid Tower, used for actual work.

I know, I know. Yes, that is serious storage and costs serious money. As to the Op's "Unlimited storage" I assumed that to be a figure of speech., for "a lot of storage". As nothing is ever truly unlimited.

The comment for Mr. Kauffman, was firmly tongue in cheek.

rkuaffman87 wrote:

Well it was a luxury as I wanted a LOT of storage, I was getting tired of JBODs so I was looking for a solution. The humorous part about it is I financed it by saving the interest from a high yield on-line savings account I had, so while it took me months to save up the money it really didn't cost a thing. I guess I could have used the interest money for something else but occasionally you need to splurge.

I have simply found that if you learn the habit of being a good saver when you are young those habits pay off when you become older.

Excellent use of the interest. Did a similar thing for a Car a few years ago. I financed the monthly payment from interest from good investment.

And yes, good savings management is indeed a very useful skill later in life.

I needed a lot of additional storage and purchased the 48TB version of

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/thunderbay-4/thunderbolt-3-raid-5

It works perfectly with my 2020 27" iMac.

That's impressive.

I have a lot of photos, movies and music and this thing fit the bill.