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I realize my question may sound utterly stupid, but I'd rather know the answer for sure before I decide my course of action.

It all started yesterday when I read that:

  1. Storing large media files on SSDs isn't such a good idea, because of cost/capacity ratio.

  2. Especially when you have a small SSD like mine (I have a 128GB rMBP 2013 model), which means you have to delete these large files often to make space for new ones. This will exercise more of the SSD's writes.

I'm now looking to hook up my old machine, a Windows Sony Vaio from 2008, to two 2TB external hard drives. One will be stationary and the other portable, and they will be synced on a regular basis. When I'm at location one, I will use the old machine to play media from the stationary HDD, but when I'm at location two, I will take the portable drive with me and play media from it on my rMBP.

My question is: If I play a file from an HDD on my rMBP, does it actually write anything on my rMBP's SSD? I know the file isn't copied, but perhaps it writes a temporary file, which then means this setup does not "save" me writes1?

1 I know that for regular users, worrying about "writes" is just plain irrational, I'm using this setup mainly for the convenience in having more storage than to "avoid writing" to an SSD. I'm just a curious person and would like to know the answer to this.

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It will write for sure since it's streaming, there will always be a cache folder that will store chunks of your video stream.

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  • The OP didn't say anything about streaming video. They don't mention what player they're using, but writing chunks of the file to another hard drive before playing them seems counter-productive - both VLC and mplayer do all their caching in RAM as far as I know (although the browser plugins may save files being streamed from a website).
    – user55325
    Oct 2, 2014 at 3:29
  • Clarification: I will be playing the video on a PC that's connected to an external HDD, from the HDD. Files will be downloaded directly to this external HDD via internet.
    – dontknow
    Oct 2, 2014 at 13:45

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