External SDD for Mac mini Pro

People are fixated on drive speeds and it is all baloney unless you are timing the copying of gigantic files which most people rarely do.

No SSD will slow you down. Even a humble USB 3.0 HDD won't.

The main things governing speed are the CPU/GPU and your own brain.

Drive speed is mainly an advertising gimmick.

Take a look at this video which is typical of many comparing the base M4 with the Pro.

You could save a ton of money!

His conclusion is that he would probably get more RAM and a larger SSD.

Forget the larger SSD as that is solved by using a dead cheap (by comparison) external and 16GB RAM is plenty for anyone except busy professionals.

Base M4 mini v Pro

If you are in the UK you can get the base model for £568.99 from John Lewis with a 2 year guarantee.

By a slow HDD I mean no slower than USB 3.0

If you are using USB 2.0 there could be a problem.

USB 3.0 speeds are faster than the speeds needed when exporting or rendering videos so there will be no bottleneck.

Exporting a 4K video is at the most 40MB/s so even a dead slow 200MB/s HDD would have more than enough speed.

The M1 should have been faster than the old 27" but not a great deal.

The M2 is about twice as fast and the M4 roughly three times faster than the old 27".

As long as they are USB 3.0 or faster, external drives should not be a bottleneck.

I don't know where you "read" it but it is not correct.

You need to have realistic expectations of performance which you can only do by comparing yourself with others.

If you are experiencing very slow performance it almost certainly something to do with the way you have got your computer setup or your method of working rather than unsatisfactory equipment . . . in other words "user-error".

An ultra fast external SSD would be useful as a "work" disk for real time, full resolution, uncompressed video production. As a "work" disk, it can speed up the processing of very large software projects which can have thousands of files. The other possible case might be for a high volume file server in a workplace assuming the network has very high speeds.

Other than that, any USB 3.X SSD drive will likely be sufficient. Even though the Mini may not support "dual lane"USB, you could still get transfer speeds of USB 3.2 of 600-800 megabytes per second.

In terms of RAM, especially Adobe apps, you need as much RAM as you can possibly afford. I found in my experience a minimum of 32 GB RAM is needed. With 16GB of RAM, you will quickly get into memory swapping with an editing sessions of any length time especially if you have multiple apps open which will definitely slow things down.

Also, with the apps you mention, they can store massive amounts of data in your home library folder such as caches, saved settings, effects, etc. (particularly ApplicationSupport). We are talking 10's of gigabytes that cannot be located elsewhere. So, you will probably want at a mimic of 512GB internal but preferably 1 terabyte.

One last note, for music and video streaming, even a USB 3.0 spinner will be more than fast enough because even 4K UHD HD videos only stream from disk at 30-40 megabytes per second and music is even less demanding than that. It would also be good for just plain archival storage or backup.

You don't need SSDs but they are more robust as they don't have any delicate moving parts and they are the future.

Although they have no mechanical bits they do wear out as every time you write info to them they add a bit of wear to the chips and the number of times they can be written to is finite though they should last many years.

That's why I've got 4 . . . they are not much more than HDDs.

What's "dual lane"?

Addendum: Is it RAID ?

You don't need those speeds unless you are transferring hundreds of gigabytes on a daily basis.

Yes, the cheapest from a recognised manufacturer, not one of those weird Chinese name types.

Crucial and Kingston are pretty reputable and do some very cheap units along with expensive ones!

You will have to decide whether you want the SATA type or NVMe and you will need an enclosure.

USB 3.0 and USB-C enclosures are under £10 whereas Thunderbolt enclosures are nearer to £100.

Thunderbolts are much faster but USB 3.0/USB-C should be perfectly OK.

If you decide they are not, then you have only wasted a tenner!

Not very much info to go with, we need to know the configuration of the MM you intend to get. If you want speed and overall performance get as much RAM and internal storage as you can possibly afford. ALL apps should be stored internally, the only things that should be stored externally are large libraries such as your Final Cut Pro library.

Also, is this a hobby machine or something you intend to earn your primary living with?

Re: “So why do we need SSD then?”

There are two basic types of drive speed: sequential read and write speeds, and random access time.

SSDs absolutely slaughter HDDs on random access time, and that becomes apparent when starting up a computer or launching applications, things that often involve a great deal of jumping around from place to place on the disk. This is why any decent personal computer today will have a SSD for its startup drive, and why you want to store things like the Lightroom catalog (a frequently-accessed database) on one.

Re: “Apple doesn't support USB-C 3.2 2x2, so this narrow the available SDDs out there”

A USB-C(USB 3.1 Gen 2)/NVMe SSD will run plenty fast for many applications, yet will not cost much more than a slower USB 3/SATA one.

As long as a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 SSD can perform reasonably well after falling back to USB 3.1 Gen 2 speed, there’s no reason you have to cross such a SSD off your list. (But of course, you wouldn’t want to pay much if a premium over the price of a USB 3.1 Gen 2 one.)