Best External SSD For New Mini

[Stephen.R]

No, I have USB-A, Thunderbolt 2 RAID and USB-C 3.1 SSD external drives. I haven't had an issue with any of them.

Are those bus powered or have their own power supplies though?

 

[F-Train]

Are those bus powered or have their own power supplies though?

The Thunderbolt 2 RAID has its own power, the others are bus powered.

 

[Dr. Stealth]

I see a couple different ones on ebay including the same vendor I bought mine from on Amazon (I believe).

Same price for the one I have, $200 but $155 for the Leidian, which I believe uses the same internal board. The Leidian ships from Texas which would have been nice for me. Mine came from China but didn't take too long.

And a Dual m.2 enclosure.. Kind of pricey...

 

[Ploki]

I see a couple different ones on ebay including the same vendor I bought mine from on Amazon (I believe).

Same price for the one I have, $200 but $155 for the Leidian, which I believe uses the same internal board. The Leidian ships from Texas which would have been nice for me. Mine came from China but didn't take too long.


View attachment 810093

And a Dual m.2 enclosure.. Kind of pricey...

View attachment 810094

I bought the leidian from aliexpress for 99$. But it takes a month to ship to here.

By far the cheapest

 

[Dr. Stealth]

Skip this post. I have moved on.

 

[jdmc]

Hiya. A few questions....

Okay I've been able to thoroughly check out this new Thunderbolt/NVMe combo for a day. I'm pretty happy with it but it's not ideal as I would expect for the cost. Of course the 970 EVO 1TB is a screamer and I have others as well in a PC. But, the same 970 EVO (but 2TB version) gets much faster R&W speeds in my PC than I get on the 2018 Mini using Thunderbolt.

Did you test the 1TB blade with the PC, or only the Mac? Did you test the 2TB blade with the Mac, or only the PC? In each case, how is the blade connected to the computer?

SSD is formatted Journaled [HFS+].

Egad... why not APFS?!

Anyway I used two different benchmarks on both the PC and Mac. And they pretty much match per platform.

We're talking about a 2018 Mac mini here, right? What size of internal SSD does it have? Take whatever benchmarks you ran against the 970 EVO on the Mac, and run them against the internal SSD instead. How do the results compare?

Cheers,
=jdmc=

 

[Dr. Stealth]

Hiya. A few questions....



Did you test the 1TB blade with the PC, or only the Mac? Did you test the 2TB blade with the Mac, or only the PC? In each case, how is the blade connected to the computer?



Egad... why not APFS?!



We're talking about a 2018 Mac mini here, right? What size of internal SSD does it have? Take whatever benchmarks you ran against the 970 EVO on the Mac, and run them against the internal SSD instead. How do the results compare?

Cheers,
=jdmc=

Thank you for trying to help. That's admirable...

I returned the enclosure and bought the Samsung X5... No more problem... 😀

 

[Po Dameron]

Thank you for trying to help. That's admirable...

I returned the enclosure and bought the Samsung X5... No more problem... 😀


View attachment 810812

Wow I plan to do the same so it's great to see. Is TRIM supported or is that moot now?

 

[Ploki]

Looks cool.
Haven't seen nVME drive before in person, these are SMALL.

Can't test it since i didnt receive my mini or 13" yet. 😀

I paid roughly ~330€ for the Leidian TB3 case + 1TB 970 EVO.

I bought both macs with 512GB SSD, buying 1TB would cost me 480€ on the mini and 500€ on the 13".

So I got:
- twice as much space
- hopefully twice as much bandwidth (since both internal and external work 2gb/s)
- a lost less money (actually i got more money, i paid a lot less money)

 

[Dr. Stealth]

Looks cool.
Haven't seen nVME drive before in person, these are SMALL.

Can't test it since i didnt receive my mini or 13" yet. 😀

I paid roughly ~330€ for the Leidian TB3 case + 1TB 970 EVO.

I bought both macs with 512GB SSD, buying 1TB would cost me 480€ on the mini and 500€ on the 13".

So I got:
- twice as much space
- hopefully twice as much bandwidth (since both internal and external work 2gb/s)
- a lost less money (actually i got more money, i paid a lot less money)

I'll be interested to see the speeds once you have it running. I bought a similar case and returned it due to poor write speeds of 1200 MB/s. It could have been a bad board, I'm not sure why write speeds were so much slower than expected. With the new X5 I'm getting around 2000 MB/s write and 2650 MB/s read.

Cheers !