When buying a modern portable Mac, where upgrading storage later is challenging and/or expensive, it has become important to choose the capacity you think you’ll need over the life of the computer.

This can be a tough proposition for some users. Plus, if buying used or if your finances are constrained, you might not be able to afford that much from the start.

Without breaking the bank, here’s another way to augment your Mac’s storage capacity—at least for some types of media. This week’s tip is not for the faint of heart, buy even novices can succeed with my help.

For Portable Macs

This tip applies to you if your Mac has an SD card slot. This includes any 13” MacBook Air from 2010 or later and 13” and 15” MacBook Pro from 2009–2015. Your Mac is especially ripe for this upgrade if, like Erika’s, it came with a 120GB drive, or if its internal storage is difficult and expensive to upgrade.

Base Qi

Do you have large music and/or photo libraries? Do you have other large files that you don’t open often but want to access locally on your Mac instead of connecting an external drive?

My recommendation is to buy a microSDXC card and put it in a BaseQi Ninja Stealth Drive. This is a fancy adapter that inserts in your SD card slot and fits flush with the edge of your Mac. You can buy any of various capacities, currently up to 400GB, to put in the Ninja drive.

Erase & Go

Once you get the adapter and card out of their challenging packages and put the card in the adapter and the adapter in your Mac, I recommend erasing the card to GUID partition scheme and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. This is usually a two-step process, first to set the format and second the partition.

Then, you can copy your large media libraries to it and tell associated applications where to find them. Plus, Time Machine will include the contents of the card in its backups of your computer.

If this doesn’t make sense to you or you get stuck, let me know and I can walk you through. Or, book an appointment with me for a full service experience.