Model Storage Policy

A cold film-reel crate linked by an amber cable to a warm internal vault — hot weights stay home, cold packs travel

Hot on SSD. Cold on the Ark. That is the whole policy.

Always-on agents and daemons must not depend on a drive you can unplug. Multi-tens-of-GB video packs must not fill the MBP boot volume. Creative session weights live on removable media and are symlinked into ComfyUI when the volume is mounted.

Canonical lab copy (scripts + longer rationale): comfy-lab/MODEL_STORAGE_POLICY.md.

Tiers

Tier	Criteria	Store on	Path pattern
Hot	Loaded most sessions; LaunchAgents / cathedral / always-on tools	Internal SSD	Real files under `~/…` (e.g. agent MLX/TTS paths)
Cold	Session work: video gen, large DiTs, research quants	Transcend, 4 TB Ark, SD card	`/Volumes/<Drive>/ai-models/<pack>/` → symlink into ComfyUI

Hot examples

Sanctum-MLX / cathedral council weights
TTS / STT / small embeddings used by daemons
Anything that must work after reboot with no external disk

Cold examples

MiniMax H3 (FL2VA, Ref2VA, Heretic TE, VAEs) — see MiniMax H3 video lab
Other large ComfyUI video/image packs (≥ ~10 GB, occasional)

Why

Concern	Hot (SSD)	Cold (external)
Cold load	Fast	Slower (USB/SD sequential; often 2–5×)
Inference after load	RAM	RAM (same once in unified memory)
Internal free space	Protected	Offloaded
Travel	Always present	Bring the drive

Layout

# Cold — external (when mounted)
/Volumes/Transcend/ai-models/
/Volumes/Ark/ai-models/          # 4TB Ark when present
/Volumes/<Other>/ai-models/
  MiniMax-H3/
    diffusion_models/
    text_encoders/
    vae/

# ComfyUI Desktop model root (hot-facing)
~/Documents/ComfyUI/models/
  # cold packs appear as symlinks into the volume above

Link helper (does not destroy a complete multi-GB local file):

cd ~/Projects/comfy-lab
./scripts/link-minimax-h3-models.sh
# override volume:
# MINIMAX_H3_ROOT=/Volumes/Ark/ai-models/MiniMax-H3 ./scripts/link-minimax-h3-models.sh

Decision checklist

Daemon or every-session tool without a plugged drive? → Hot.
≥ ~10 GB and only for creative/video sessions? → Cold.
Internal free under ~50 GB? → Prefer cold; free SSD first.
Traveling? Pack Transcend/Ark if cold models are required offline.

Anti-patterns

Filling the boot SSD with multi-tens-of-GB video packs “for convenience.”
Replacing a complete local multi-GB file with a symlink to a partial external copy.
Putting always-on cathedral/TTS weights only on a volume that unmounts.