Finally updating my 2014 MacBook Air. This is what I travel with. Generally after a day of shooting I download cards to an external hard drive. I do not really edit while traveling, mainly just deleting bad images and video clips. Will load Photoshop and Bridge on it. Maybe FCPX...But all editing happens at home on the iMac. Back from 3wks in Alberta, BC and Alaska and came home with a terabyte of images, lol.

On a budget and now need new portable hard drive/s and card readers, etc...Is 256gb enough?

Thanks!

Hi @aquabluedreams - congrats on your upcoming new laptop! The new ones are very impressive.

I totally get being in a budget. With that said, sadly we cannot upgrade the drive space later. I always carry additional external SSD drives, but it is convenient to have some drive space even if you don’t have your extra drive with you.

For that reason, invest in the 512GB drive. It may hurt a bit initially, but you’ll be happy over the long run. After all, this is not a frequent purchase. Your last laptop lasted you 11 years. The larger drive now will help you maximize the longevity of your new machine as well.

Enjoy!

Chip

Yes, I definitely second the 512GB SSD hard drive if you can.
I'm on a refurbished 2017 macbook air bought in Thailand in 2020, and it's still fine, but will definitely need to update at some point.

I can edit 4K 8bit video files by running FCPX on an external Samsung SSD which helps, but the chipset is too old to read recent codecs like HEVC (example GoPro 4k files), so I edit those with proxy files.
And I can't edit in Resolve because the chipset is too old for optimised playback (FCPX integration is doing an amazing jo)...

If you drop below 20/30 GB of free space on the internal hard drive it slows down performance, so get the space if you can.