What additional computer hardware do you have?

Apart from your monitor, keyboard and mouse - what additional computer hardware do you have?

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My MBP is docked quite a lot of the time - single cable to my LG5K monitor (which also takes care of charging my Mac).

Connected to the monitor, I have two 1TB SSDs for TimeMachine backups and an Aukey USB extender, to which I have connected my Kindle and iPhone charging cables (though I use a wireless charger for my iPhone) and a USB DAC which is connected to my amplifier. That leaves one USB port free.

My SSDs are:

I have had several Crucial SSDs and touch wood they have always been very reliable. This is my first Samsung SSD. I had a standard Samsung HD a few years ago but it failed and I had to reformat it. Heard good things about their SSDs tho, and the T5 is tiny!

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  • USB 3.0 Hub with GBit ethernet
  • 3 TiB of external HDD (3 devices)
  • HP wireless printer
  • USB coffee warmer (I never actually used it, but it was a present from my aunt years ago)
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  • Card reader
  • Speakers/Headphones
  • Barrier - technically this is not hardware, but it does replace a piece of hardware I can’t do without and that’s a KVM
  • XBox controller :smiley:
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@AstonJ @NobbZ, I wonder, why do you need that much storage :smiley:

I have a macbook given by my company which is 250GB and before that I used my own macbook air with 128GB. Now, both of those are not enough, especially the 128GB (I basically stopped turning on my macbook, because it says not enough memory). Now I am building a PC, and thinking, if 1 TB is too much and I should just go with 500GB, and when I saw your posts, I was wondering, am I missing something :smiley:

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My MBP itself has 2TB storage and part of the reason for getting it was because the 2TB version is meant to be slightly more performant. Plus although it was fine to begin with I ran out of disk space on my 256GB MBA pretty quickly (and had to rely on external drives for large source files) so I wanted to ensure I avoided that with this Mac.

With regards to my external disks, they are used for Time Machine backups, which gives you multiple snapshots of your computer at different times (so bigger is definitely better for these).

I actually have two standard 1TB external HDs to, which I used periodically for Time Machine (but they are not always connected - and kept away from the computer).

500GB is probably enough unless you do video or graphical work and don’t want to use an external HD :+1:

I have one of those too! And a scanner, tho it is rarely used now.

I have a couple of those too :laughing:

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Hmm, off the top of my head I know my peripherals are:

  • Keyboard.
  • Mouse.
  • Monitor.
  • Speakers and subwoofer.
  • Backlighting, lights up based on what appears on my screen to flood-fill the wall with lighting, 5 ‘zones’ that map to different areas of the screen (or if a program knows the API it can send whatever it wants but nothing does, it’s ancient). I actually quite enjoy it.
  • Couple of fans for my face that I rarely use connected via USB (great to control speed up and down for game interactions though, lol).
  • Some… claw device, whatever it was called, hand fits on it, has a whole set of keyboard keys, mouse mappings, etc… Let’s you control a game with one hand, it’s pretty convenient but definitely have to get used to it, it’s also ancient.
  • Camera.
  • Mic.
  • A few TB worth of external drives.
  • I know some other things I’m forgetting, my desk is covered in things front and back…
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  • Keyboard.
  • Mouse.
  • Display.
  • Speakers + subwoofer.
  • USB headsets.
  • Thunderbolt 3 dock.
  • Several TB3 hubs (disconnected most of the time) with Ethernet, card readers, USB-A ports, HDMI outputs.
  • 6TB external HDD.
  • 3TB external HDD.
  • 120GB / 250GB / 500GB external SSDs.
  • 250GB external SSD, used exclusively by Mac’s Time Machine backup tool.
  • 500GB SD card (plugged directly into my iMac Pro; it has a slot for it).
  • USB 3.0 hub with on/off buttons for every slot.
  • KVM switch that got only demoted to keyboard and mouse switch between my gaming PC and work laptop (the display is hooked to both but detects its active input and switches accordingly at the press of a single button).
  • External CD / DVD / BD-R disc reader and writer.

…and I am still thinking of buying an external RAID enclosure, likely for 5x 16TB HDDs running in RAID 5 (so I’d have “only” 64TB and not 80). :laughing:

Also eyeing this world-first external 4-slot NVMe SSD enclosure – sold on eBay at the moment – and thinking of buying 4x Intel 660p SSDs at 2TB in RAID 0 config for 8TB of external SSD space in total.

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In current use: Mac Mini, external drive (cuz the mini’s SSD is only 256GB), portable backup drive, larger backup drive, magic trackpad (not sure if you wanted that listed 'cuz it’s in place of a mouse), cheap old speakers, USB and Bluetooth headphones (separately, not one that does both), cheap old webcam I really should replace, USB3 hub, UPS, networked printer/scanner, crappy router supplied by Verizon, MacBook Air, and I ass-u-me you don’t wanna include phones and tablets.

Not in current use: ancient eeePC I wanna slap Linux on eventually (now has Windows XP), ancient (2009 I think) MacBook Pro that I keep mostly cuz it has a CD/DVD drive, WiFi router from the days when the ISP-supplied stuff was not WiFi, thingy that I forget whether it’s a switch or a hub 'cuz it’s been unused since about 2005, thumb drives ranging from 100 megs to 64 gigs, and spare keyboards, mice (and mats), speakers, and Ethernet cables. (And assorted more stuff but I’m not gonna go to the garage and get the box down off the shelf just to see.)

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I don’t need that much, but I’m used to having plenty of storage from my military days, when I was online only up to 5 hours per week. I’m used to hoard documentation, audio and video data or photos, also, there is a TiB disk, which I use for backing up data that I do not trust to be backed up by cloudservices.

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