2018 Mac Mini’s internal SSD question

[phrehdd]

No need is very different from an active detriment which was what I was arguing that it isn't. Our OP was talking about partitioning into data and system which is exactly a housekeeping partitioning scheme. It also serves to facilitate multi-boot environments, though granted unless both systems are versions of macOS, the APFS logical partitioning wouldn't then be the trick.



Write speeds are better, the drive will have a longer endurance rating, i.e you'll be able to write more data to it before it's expected to die. Whether that's worth it is a different story, but there are reasons.



Regarding failure rates that's both true and false. If the objective is cold storage, SSDs will never really catch on since they fail much sooner than hard drives or tape. But yes, under the discussed circumstances, sure.



The internal SSD will likely outlive the other components, like the CPU or PSU. Or maybe not, but it'll at the very least (assuming no spectacular conditions), your SSD will last a very, very long time.

You mention multi-boot which is not all that typical and certainly has nothing to do with the scenario mentioned of separation of OS and other items on the drive. There is no real advantage to separating out on an SSD as originally explained was a goal. If people remember things such as SCSI ASPI tricks, then you have a good case for isolating on the drive some areas that are rarely addressed, areas that are intensive in reads and writes and more. If one was doing "de-frag" (not a practice common to SSD as typical housekeeping), then there are games to be played on how data is placed on a disk and more. We also don't worry about data on inner tracks or outer tracks. This is yesterday's news. SSD drives are not your father's MFM / RLL drives.

 

[getrealbro]

I didn’t mention this previously because I didn’t want to go down this particular rabbit hole, BUT…

I have always partitioned internal drives into System and Data so that I can dual boot, do clean installs, etc, without touching the info in the Data partition. I currently have 128GB USB Sticks or SD cards with different levels of Mojave: Mojave 10.14.1 clean install w/ no 3rd party apps, Mojave 10.14.1 w/ 3rd party apps, Mojave 10.14.2 w/ 3rd party apps, etc. I can boot from any one of these OR I can boot from a system partition on an external drive with El Capitan 10.11.6 to run apps that are incompatible with Mojave.

Whether I order the 128 or 256GB SSD it will be used as a System “partition” with almost all of my Data residing on an external HDD or SSD.

GetRealBro

 

[casperes1996]

You mention multi-boot which is not all that typical and certainly has nothing to do with the scenario mentioned of separation of OS and other items on the drive. There is no real advantage to separating out on an SSD as originally explained was a goal. If people remember things such as SCSI ASPI tricks, then you have a good case for isolating on the drive some areas that are rarely addressed, areas that are intensive in reads and writes and more. If one was doing "de-frag" (not a practice common to SSD as typical housekeeping), then there are games to be played on how data is placed on a disk and more. We also don't worry about data on inner tracks or outer tracks. This is yesterday's news. SSD drives are not your father's MFM / RLL drives.

No, but again you're talking about the physical representation of data. With APFS that's not something you should concern yourself with, since it's all in one physical partition regardless. I'm talking logical volume separation for the sake of conceptual data modelling into logical groups. In that aspect partitioning is still a useful tool

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"I have always partitioned internal drives into System and Data so that I can dual boot, do clean installs, etc, without touching the info in the Data partition."

You don't have to be wary of mentioning this.
It has been my "standard practice" for 30 years now.
And it will remain so until I shuffle offa this mortal coil.

BTW, when I get a 2018 Mini, it will have a partitioned internal SSD, running under HFS+ ...

 

[Ploki]

OP wrote:
"I have always partitioned internal drives into System and Data so that I can dual boot, do clean installs, etc, without touching the info in the Data partition."

You don't have to be wary of mentioning this.
It has been my "standard practice" for 30 years now.
And it will remain so until I shuffle offa this mortal coil.

BTW, when I get a 2018 Mini, it will have a partitioned internal SSD, running under HFS+ ...

that's a bad idea tho, since HFS+ doesn't have logical volumes like APFS

 

[casperes1996]

that's a bad idea tho, since HFS+ doesn't have logical volumes like APFS

Unless you use CoreStorage volumes

 

[Steve686]

The reason larger SSDs last longer and have faster write speeds comes down to the nature of how SSDs physically work.

I thought it was how they mentally work.

 

[phrehdd]

No, but again you're talking about the physical representation of data. With APFS that's not something you should concern yourself with, since it's all in one physical partition regardless. I'm talking logical volume separation for the sake of conceptual data modelling into logical groups. In that aspect partitioning is still a useful tool

Casperes, sorry but if you need to fool around at the drive level because directories are insufficient, then maybe its not the housekeeping that is suspect but the housekeeper. This is becoming woefully specious given the original stated intent in this particular thread. Take the last word please.

 

[casperes1996]

Casperes, sorry but if you need to fool around at the drive level because directories are insufficient, then maybe its not the housekeeping that is suspect but the housekeeper. This is becoming woefully specious given the original stated intent in this particular thread. Take the last word please.

You're right that we've gone well off topic at this point. I'll stand by my opinion that there's still valid purposes for partitioning your drive, but I think it's fair to call the discussion quits here, since we're far off the point of the thread and whatnot anyhow
[doublepost=1550077102][/doublepost]

I thought it was how they mentally work.

Hehe, alright, good one. Point was just that an SSD acquired from Apple would exhibit the same behaviour in that aspect as a drive from another manufacturer, since it's not an arbitrary speed restriction, but a hardware limitation of smaller drives.

 

[Zdigital2015]

Usually yes the larger SSD's have longer life and are faster, but these are custom Apple SSDs they use that are soldered to the board. I think they are all the same speed and likely have the same lifetime. I have the Mac mini with a 128GB SSD and it works fine, I keep my Photos & iTunes library and all non-essential files on my 500GB T5.

Unfortunately, they are not all the same speed -

128GB - ~>2GB/s R/~600MB/s W
256GB - 3031MB/s R/1200MB/s W
512GB - 3141MB/s R/1876MB/s W
1TB - 2816MB/s R/2741MB/s W

Source: Barefeats and Twitter - https://barefeats.com/mac-mini-2018-versus-other-macs.html and https://twitter.com/tapbot_paul/status/1060611584639361024

They most likely do not have the same lifetime in TBW (TeraBytes Written) either as larger drives almost invariably have more NAND chips to spread around the Writes and therefore run faster while having less write cycles than their smaller counterparts.

For me, the 256GB or the 512GB SSD sizes are the best best. I have 256GB on my 2016 15" tbMBP, with around 150GB free, so plenty of room, but the 128Gb on the Mac mini would have me constantly looking over my shoulder.