Depending on the vintage of your MacBook/Pro and its port, speed, and data rate, an external
hard drive of either ultra-fast rotational speed or SSD may work for a on-site external photo
library archive. If your computer has Thunderbolt ports, an adapter may allow one to utilize an
external enclosure with fast data flow rate, so the internal drive may not need to have the
library stored on its small/ish internal hard drive. A quality enclosure would need research to
locate and a suitable storage drive matched.
The external enclosure probably would need to be self-powered, and perhaps have more than
one hard drive or other storage device within it. Some of these enclosures offer a variety of
port types and to match a suitable storage drive with the enclosure, and to port speed, is an
important aspect, especially if you should ever need to use a partition on the external drive to
run the computer from a clone of the OS X. (Another unit should be used for backups of OSX
and not just Time Machine; a cloned OS X can save time from recovery/update by download.)
A different method of handling larger libraries is a matter of budget and research, then purchase.
In the meantime, until you can see what OWC or other reliable vendors of quality gear have, you
may have to settle for devices that can hold backup copies and duplicates of them. Not sure of
ideas to consider multiple storage drive external RAID? enclosures that make duplicates, would do.
Anyway, I see the situation of upgrade to a later OS X to also invite other major revisions, too.
Hardware usually follows an operating system upgrade, in one form or another.
In any event...
Good luck & happy computing! 🙂
