How much storage is left on a MAC MINI M1 256gb after macOS Big Sur and standard included apps?

For my base model M1 Mac Mini (256gb with 8gb memory) -- no fancy app or large data library, I used 66gb with 180gb left.

Although I keep all my lossless music library in network drive (almost 1T), my 2015 iMac 5k, still have almost 500gb on it.

I received M1 Mac Mini as a gift - and my ideal Mac Mini (M1) would be 16gb memory with 1T storage.

It really depends on your budget.

If I were to choose, I would rather go for max memory first, since I am more than happy to run my entire MacOS on single external Thunderbolt SSD drive (OWC Envoy Express + 1T M.2 NVMe 2280 Samsung 980 SSD).

I made a chart of my 2015 iMac SSDs (PCI-e and SATA) vs. 2020 Mac Mini SSDs (internal SSD and external Thunderbolt SSD).

If you do not mind having external drives hanging off the back

of your MacMini, 256 would be plenty if you offload most of

your data file to external drives. Things like iTunes libraries,

other music and video libraries can easily put on external drives.

And for most all that stuff, you really don't even need to have

the fastest drives either.

Personally, I prefer a "lean and mean" desktop drive and dump everything

else to an external. I only like work in progress on the machine.

One advantage I have always seen is that if the machine goes belly up, you

just plug your data drives into the new machine. No messing with

restoring Time Machine backups of all the data (and the time it takes).

(or the worry of losing data).

As for RAM, if you think you need more, get it. Since you haven't detailed

your current system RAM, how comfortable was it running apps with it?

If it was fine with 8 GB, then 8 GB will likely do, If things were a bit

"cramped", go with 16 GB.

Having an external usb drive hanging off the back of your Mac Mini can make it crash. Look for the "AP watchdog expired" error if you haven't heard about it yet. The only way to keep my Mac Mini running stable is to not attach any external drives to it.

So I would suggest buying as much internal SSD space as you can. Wish I'd knew this before I wasted my money on a 256GB SSD Mac Mini that now either crashes constantly or doesn't have enough space.

I am sorry about your misfortune with your setup.

Have you tried Thunderbolt external drive? Because I did hear about the USB disconnect issues, that I chose Thunderbolt (more expensive) and my system has not experienced any crash (yet, keeping my fingers crossed).

As you can see, I only utilized both thunderbolt ports - one is for Thunderbolt external SSD and the other is for Apple Thunderbolt display. I use Apple Thunderbolt Display's USB and ethernet for my peripherals. That might explained my luck.

Just today I cleanly installed Big Sur 11.4 and then Mojave 10.4.6 (and and BBEdit, CCC and KeePassXC. Lightroom 6.14, Photoshop CS 6, MPEG Streamclip, QuickTime Player Pro 7 to Mojave) to a MacBook Pro 15,4” i7 2.2GHz, 16 GB, 256 GB.

That MBP has had Mojave and Bootcamp with Windows 10 so I first formatted it as FAT, Master Boot Record to clear any old partition info, and then as APFS, GUID (don't know if that was necessary, though?).

After all that there is about 202 GB free space and it runs OK.

There are some limitations:

For 2020 M1 Mac Mini - only can use MacOS 11 and onwards. Currently, my M1 Mac Mini runs 2 separate Big Sur since I have 2 SSDs. When next Gen OS be introduced, I can upgrade one of the MacOS.

My late 2015 iMac - the most legacy OS it can run was Sierra.

2018 Mac Mini can’t run Sierra.

For example: If you want to run some 32 bit softwares, Mojave is the most recent MacOS will be compatible with - that will limit your hardware choices and 2020 Mac won’t be capable of running any MacOS 10.x

Big Sur 11.4 seems to take about 20 GB disk space.