Cheap External Storage for M4 Mac Mini (3.5" Platter Drives)?

[Tempest2084]

I'm about to get an Mac Mini (either an M4 or an M5 if they announce one soon). I'm coming from an old PC I built years ago (18 years ago to be exact) that I've added various SSD drives to for file storage. I'm mostly storing roms, movies, pictures, and other stuff where speed of access isn't an issue. For a while I was looking at getting an NVMe drive and placing it in a dock, but as NVMe prices are going through the roof and docks seem to have cooling/disconnect issues I'm rethinking this strategy.

My co-worker mentioned that if I need large amounts of storage (really I only need maybe 4-5TB or so) and speed isn't a necessity that I should look at some sort of external SATA enclosure where I can add multiple drives as needed. This sounds like a good idea to me since I don't need NVMe speeds (I''m not gaming or running the OS off the storage drive) but I'm not sure what kind of enclosure would work best on a Mac Mini. I'm also trying not to break the bank, so I'm thinking that some old 3.5" platter style drives might work if I can get some large enough for good price (SSD seem to be going up as fast as NVMe). I think OWC or Mediasonic make some nice ones that work well with the Mac Mini.

What's the current best moderate sized external storage solution for the cost conscious consumer who doesn't need blazing fast speeds?

 

[Minghold]

Believe it or not, those gigantic used drives that Walmart sells are a not-bad deal. (E.g., 12gb for ~$90.) These are usually lower-RPM drives that ran in security systems before being rotated out of service, which means they're fine for archival storage. (Anything you do get check with DriveDX, and return it if health is in the "yellow" zone.)

Erase/format rotational drives as MacOS Extended-journaled (or exFAT if shared with PCs), not APFS.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Be aware that while the slow drives are mounted you may encounter lags in macOS Finder. This may depend somewhat on the enclosure. I had some old mechanical drives in individual housings connected to my M1 Mac Studio that really made Finder stutter. I only turn them on when I need them now.

 

[Thirio2]

My current storage solution is a 2 bay Synology NAS with 8 Gb hdds set up with 4 Gb for Time Machine and 4 Gb for other storage. If I had it to do over I would bite the bullet and buy a 4 bay unit. Also, today 12 Gb drives are not that much more than 8 Gb. It is set up raid 1 and even if it is not considered a back up by some folks here, with 2 identical disks it works for me.

 

[Fishrrman]

My advice to the OP:
Do not... repeat, DO NOT... buy ANY platter-based drives for Mac use.

As Minghold mentions in reply 2:
"Erase/format rotational drives as MacOS Extended-journaled (or exFAT if shared with PCs), not APFS."

I opened another thread in the Tahoe OS section, and am currently being roundly criticized there for reporting that the newly-release 26.4 beta no longer fully supports HFS+ drives. They are seen, but are now mounted as being "read only".

This may have been an oversight or bug on the part of the software developers.
Then again, it may not be.
I'm thinking that Apple (which is already on the verge of rendering Rosetta2 obsolete) has also decided that the time has come to deprecate support for HFS+.

I could be totally wrong -- actually, I hope I AM wrong about this.
But... since HFS+ dates from the days of platter-based drives, and since Apple no longer uses platter-based HDD's in any of their products, could they have decided that it's time for HFS+ to walk the plank...?

 

[Minghold]

As Minghold mentions in reply 2:
"Erase/format rotational drives as MacOS Extended-journaled (or exFAT if shared with PCs), not APFS."

I opened another thread in the Tahoe OS section, and am currently being roundly criticized there for reporting that the newly-release 26.4 beta no longer fully supports HFS+ drives. They are seen, but are now mounted as being "read only".

This may have been an oversight or bug on the part of the software developers.
Then again, it may not be.

If it's deliberate, then Apple is declaring war on cheap archival storage, and will have finally abandoned any pretense of caring at all about any non-corporate buyer.

If it's an "accidental" bug, then that's another name for a trial-balloon, and see above.

If it's an actual bug, then it's yet more evidence in support of the idea that no one anywhere should ever trust a year-current MacOS version.

 

[Soondae]

It's deliberate, I received plenty of notices from Apple that I no longer will be able to use my Airport Time Capsule for Time Machine back ups on Tahoe. So I still use it as a repeater in my office (it's great) however I do not use its HFS+ drive any longer. I cannot reformat it say to APFS (which would be preferred) as the firmware hasn't been updated to support any of the newer file formats.

So my response was to bite the bullet and purchase a Seagate 40Gbps 4 TB drive that I have partitioned two 2 TB areas and made one solely for Time Machine back ups and the other I haven't really utilized yet.

My MacMini M4 is the base model so I purchased a dock with NVME and have off loaded my Music , photos, download folder and such to it to keep the MacMini drive free so it runs well without clutter.

 

[smithrh]

Despite some people making crazy claims here, hard disk storage on MacOS is completely fine, with some caveats:

• Not for boot drives / OS
• Not for Photos library (SSD with APFS pretty much required here)
• Not for high-throughput, data-intensive usage such as video editing

Beyond that, it's absolutely completely fine.

Even APFS on HDDs is absolutely completely fine. Yes, there's a minor performance hit but I stress minor.

Unlike others here, I actually have experience with this, and have well over 100 TB in HDD storage all in APFS format across more than a dozen HDDs. I've compared HFS+ to APFS and APFS is absolutely acceptable.

HDDs work just fine. APFS on HDDs also works just fine.

There's no conspiracy here. People should stop embarrassing themselves.

However, move quick on getting HDDs, AI is gobbling up HDDs now just like it did with SSDs and RAM.

To the OP: OWC do make good enclosures, and they understand the Mac. Lots of other enclosures out there at much lower cost - you don't need thunderbolt speed with HDDs, even USB 3.0 is fine, which opens up your searching quite a bit.

 

[Tempest2084]

To the OP: OWC do make good enclosures, and they understand the Mac. Lots of other enclosures out there at much lower cost - you don't need thunderbolt speed with HDDs, even USB 3.0 is fine, which opens up your searching quite a bit.

So USB 3.0 will be ok for storing files? What about steaming movies at 1080p? I use UMS to stream movies from my storage drive to a PS4 I have in my game room. Currently it's running off a WD Green HDD thats probably hooked up to SATA II (my PC is that old) so I imagine USB 3.0 speeds would still be ok.

What about eSATA? I know the Mac Mini doesn't have an eSATA port but I think there are eSATA adapters for the Mini.

 

[smithrh]

USB 3.0 plenty fast enough for file storage and streaming at even 4k.

No need to worry about eSATA.

 

[QuarterSwede]

I’m not a HDD fan. Almost every hard drive I’ve had has failed over the years at some point. To me it’s not worth the risk of data loss. Unless you need massive amounts of storage in RAID and the room for a large drive bay. I wouldn’t go that route with SSDs/NVMEs being cheap enough and absolutely night and day fast in comparison. Plus all modern OSs are designed with solid state speeds in mind first and don’t always play well with the spool up time/lag of HDDs.

I bought a 2TB Crucial X9 (1Gbps read/write) for my son’s M4 mini and a 2TB Crucial X10 Pro (2Gbps read/write) for my M4 mini and either are much better options. They’re absolutely tiny (2”x 2”) and bus powered. The slower X9 (and cheaper) is still fast enough that he can’t tell a difference when launching/playing demanding games from it or the internal NVME. You do have to use the included 4” USB-C cable though. It’s extremely picky about cable length and quality. Don’t bother with buying sticks and putting them in enclosures. It’s often more expensive to do that if you don’t already have a stick laying around.

Unless you have a growing collection of 4K video, I wouldn’t waste the brainpower on spinning rust. It’s a technology gasping at its last breaths and was never reliable enough to trust, hence RAID in the first place.

 

[Tempest2084]

If I go the SSD route I'd have to really cut down on size. What I might do is get an HDD for now and switch over to SDD once the prices go back to normal in a year or two. An HDD should be stable enough for a few years.

 

[smithrh]

Again, HDDs are fine. They're a well-proven, efficient and effective mass storage solution.

Do individual HDDs sometime fail? Well of course, and you should be prepared for that if the data has value. But HDDs tend to follow what's called a "bathtub curve" where failures are most common when the drive is new, then the failure rate stays low for years, then an increasing failure rate over time after that.

 

[Minghold]

It's deliberate, I received plenty of notices from Apple that I no longer will be able to use my Airport Time Capsule for Time Machine back ups on Tahoe.

If there's one bet in the universe that will always pay off, it's that Apple will dick over it's own customers every time from five different angles.

So my response was to bite the bullet and purchase a Seagate 40Gbps 4 TB drive that I have partitioned two 2 TB areas and made one solely for Time Machine back ups and the other I haven't really utilized yet.

I never use Time Machine -- can you run it off an exFAT partition?

 

[Minghold]

Unlike others here, I actually have experience with this, and have well over 100 TB in HDD storage all in APFS format across more than a dozen HDDs. I've compared HFS+ to APFS and APFS is absolutely acceptable.

APFS will become absolutely unacceptable to you for archival purposes regardless of device media type the split second you incur partition corruption that Disk Utility cannot fix -- and you belatedly realize that there's dick-on-a-stick out there for 3rd-party recovery utilities that work with APFS. --Then you'll hightail it to HFS+, exFAT, NTFS or even a common linux format that any of a dozen tools can deal with.

 

[smithrh]

Nope.

 

[bzgnyc2]

So USB 3.0 will be ok for storing files? What about steaming movies at 1080p? I use UMS to stream movies from my storage drive to a PS4 I have in my game room. Currently it's running off a WD Green HDD thats probably hooked up to SATA II (my PC is that old) so I imagine USB 3.0 speeds would still be ok.

What about eSATA? I know the Mac Mini doesn't have an eSATA port but I think there are eSATA adapters for the Mini.

Very few HDD sustain more than 250MB/second read/write which is ~ 2.5Gbps or half the base USB 3.0 speeds. In other words, even a 5Gbps USB interface will not be the bottleneck for any single HDD that I know.

Which in any case should be fine for playing back movies at 1080p from an HDD assuming they are stored in a reasonable format. Standard read speeds on Bluray is ~ 40Mbps so pretty much any HDD will be >20x faster.

USB 10Gbps, Thunderbolt, USB4, etc are needed for RAID and SSD, which are 10x faster than HDD. SSD have been a real breakthrough in performance and greatly boost many applications. However, HDD are very cost effective for archival use or video playback at normal speed.

In the long-term I do see declining support for HDD. At the application level and the filesystem level in Apple's case. Developers optimize their programs for the hardware they have and they tend not to have HDD these days. So the algorithms they use are not HDD-aware. Same thing happened decades ago with tape storage, which used to be dominant and people developed all sorts of algorithms optimized for sorting data assuming the performance characteristics of tapes. Those still worked on HDD but when people developed new algorithms assuming HDD, they were unusable on tapes. I saw the equivalent of that for SSD in a now several versions old update to MS SQL Server. They changed the default sorting algorithm to run more efficiently on SSD and/or in-memory but it's painful out-of-memory on HDD. Like 50x slower. There's a "secret" (hard to find) flag to use the old sort algorithm which restored performance to large databases stored on HDD in those situations, but you can see where things are going.

 

[SalisburySam]

I'm about to get an Mac Mini (either an M4 or an M5 if they announce one soon). I'm coming from an old PC I built years ago (18 years ago to be exact) that I've added various SSD drives to for file storage. I'm mostly storing roms, movies, pictures, and other stuff where speed of access isn't an issue. For a while I was looking at getting an NVMe drive and placing it in a dock, but as NVMe prices are going through the roof and docks seem to have cooling/disconnect issues I'm rethinking this strategy.

My co-worker mentioned that if I need large amounts of storage (really I only need maybe 4-5TB or so) and speed isn't a necessity that I should look at some sort of external SATA enclosure where I can add multiple drives as needed. This sounds like a good idea to me since I don't need NVMe speeds (I''m not gaming or running the OS off the storage drive) but I'm not sure what kind of enclosure would work best on a Mac Mini. I'm also trying not to break the bank, so I'm thinking that some old 3.5" platter style drives might work if I can get some large enough for good price (SSD seem to be going up as fast as NVMe). I think OWC or Mediasonic make some nice ones that work well with the Mac Mini.

What's the current best moderate sized external storage solution for the cost conscious consumer who doesn't need blazing fast speeds?

M4 Mac mini here and I ported over my HDDs used on my previous 2017 iMac with no issues. There are two 8TB HDDs ($130 each from Costco several years ago), and a very aged Lacie 4TB HDD. These are all attached to an Acasis 40gbps dock which includes an NVMe enclosure with a Samsung 4TB SSD for a total of 24TB of external storage plus the 1TB internal RAM on the Mac mini. All works very well with Sequoia on the Mac mini.

Yeah, my HDDs are old, likely to fail at some point sooner rather than later, but testing shows no issues and they’ve kept spinning along merrily well…until they won’t any more whenever that is. I accept that, and keep the more important stuff in RAM, with one backup to one of the HDDs or the NVMe, and (not “or”) the cloud.

 

[Minghold]

Nope.

I buy lots from recyclers weekly, and frequently run into APFS corruption so severe that Disk Utility won't even *erase* the drive (even with SIP dissbled, and the drive's SMART status is excellent) -- unless it's a version from El Capitan or earlier (which is always an interesting problem when the drive is soldered inside a machine that does not support ElCap). Get customers with recovery work, too, and have sad news to relay most of the time APFS is involved.

 

[Non-Euclidean]

So USB 3.0 will be ok for storing files? What about steaming movies at 1080p? I use UMS to stream movies from my storage drive to a PS4 I have in my game room. Currently it's running off a WD Green HDD thats probably hooked up to SATA II (my PC is that old) so I imagine USB 3.0 speeds would still be ok.

What about eSATA? I know the Mac Mini doesn't have an eSATA port but I think there are eSATA adapters for the Mini.

Its fine. The majority of people running a NAS hosting Plex are using spinning rust.

 

[ignatius345]

Just make sure you build redundancy/backup into your setup. Any drive (HDD or SSD) can fail at any time.

 

[ignatius345]

Again, HDDs are fine. They're a well-proven, efficient and effective mass storage solution.

Do individual HDDs sometime fail? Well of course, and you should be prepared for that if the data has value. But HDDs tend to follow what's called a "bathtub curve" where failures are most common when the drive is new, then the failure rate stays low for years, then an increasing failure rate over time after that.

I've got a couple basic ass 2.5" HDDs I've had in service for backup for several years now. I've had HDDs fail, but I've also had SSDs fail. As long as everything is backed up, drive failure is just something you plan for and deal with when it happens.

Obviously SSD is a better choice for a variety of reasons, but they're bat**** expensive right now, so for some uses you just make do with a more cost-effective HDD and upgrade down the road. That's what I'm doing -- not about to spend $350-400+ for a faster Time Machine backup 😂

 

[mdcmdcmdc]

Believe it or not, those gigantic used drives that Walmart sells are a not-bad deal. (E.g., 12gb for ~$90.) These are usually lower-RPM drives that ran in security systems before being rotated out of service, which means they're fine for archival storage. (Anything you do get check with DriveDX, and return it if health is in the "yellow" zone.)

Erase/format rotational drives as MacOS Extended-journaled (or exFAT if shared with PCs), not APFS.

Be very careful with used HDDs.

HDDs, even slower ones (5400 rpm), have spinning platters and moving heads that have to line up very accurately and repeatedly over years of continuous use. Personally, I don't use an HDD for more than 5-6 years for storing critical information, and that's with a 3-2-1 backup system (3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite). Maybe these drives are OK for archival storage, where you write it once and put it away in a box, but I wouldn't trust it for anything you'd be upset to lose.

 

[mdcmdcmdc]

My advice to the OP:
Do not... repeat, DO NOT... buy ANY platter-based drives for Mac use.

As Minghold mentions in reply 2:
"Erase/format rotational drives as MacOS Extended-journaled (or exFAT if shared with PCs), not APFS."

I opened another thread in the Tahoe OS section, and am currently being roundly criticized there for reporting that the newly-release 26.4 beta no longer fully supports HFS+ drives. They are seen, but are now mounted as being "read only".

This may have been an oversight or bug on the part of the software developers.
Then again, it may not be.
I'm thinking that Apple (which is already on the verge of rendering Rosetta2 obsolete) has also decided that the time has come to deprecate support for HFS+.

I could be totally wrong -- actually, I hope I AM wrong about this.
But... since HFS+ dates from the days of platter-based drives, and since Apple no longer uses platter-based HDD's in any of their products, could they have decided that it's time for HFS+ to walk the plank...?

I replied to your other thread because I have HDDs I use for backup and secondary storage, and I format them as HFS+, so your observation was of concern to me.

Whether or not it's a "bug" in the 26.4 beta, I think it's clear that the writing is on the wall for HFS+. Likewise, I have Mac format CDs that I burned with a Mac in 2010 that I can read on my 2011 MBP with High Sierra, but not on my M1 with Tahoe.

 

[throAU]

All the major hard drive vendors have pre-sold everything until 2028. Do not expect cheap storage any time soon.

If you find something even halfway cheap, buy it now because things are going to get much worse before they get better.