Disadvantages of choosing M4 Pro Mini with 512GB vs 1TB SSD ?

[Fomalhaut]

Apart from the obvious reduction in storage capacity, what are the pros and cons of choosing the base 512GB storage and adding external USB or TB4 SSDs for mass storage?

I plan on keeping large media files on the external drive(s) / NAS, and using the internal only for the OS, applications, and temporary files such as iCloud docs, caches etc.

My main concerns are:

(1) disk performance - but it looks like the 512GB SSD is getting > 4000MB/s in both read and write and this is almost certainly "good enough" for application and OS use.

(2) SSD wear - I plan on using external drives for the large data writes, so the internal should have only "normal" OS and application writes, and mostly data reads, so I don't think write-volume limits are likely to be an issue with normal use.

(3) potential disconnections. I haven't seen many of these during normal usage, but I imagine that an external drive is somewhat less stable than the built-in storage, especially the USB ones that may involve additional software stacks.

I like the idea of having a bit more internal space, and it is relevant on a laptop where external drives can be a hassle when mobile, but I find it hard to stomach the $200 cost of a mere 512GB upgrade.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

 

[AAPLGeek]

You're overthinking it. 512GB is the way to go if you're planning on keeping large media on external drives.

1. People here like to keep obsessing over Blackmagic numbers, but in reality anything over 2000MB/s is more than good enough for apps and OS. In fact, sequential disk numbers have very little bearing on overall OS snappiness.

2. No one needs to worry about SSD wear unless they're crunching large numbers all day. Any SSD is more likely to fail due to other reasons before reaching end of its TBW lifespan.

3. Invest in a decent brand enclosure with a quality cable and you would never have to worry about potential disconnections. I have 3 drives connected to my Mac -- TB3, USB4 and a USB 3 and I've only ever had one disconnection in over 2 years. A new cable fixed it.

Absolutely zero point in giving Apple $200 for a measly 500GB upgrade. I'd max out the RAM over it any day.

 

[Alameda]

You're overthinking it. 512GB is the way to go if you're planning on keeping large media on external drives.

1. People here like to keep obsessing over Blackmagic numbers, but in reality anything over 2000MB/s is more than good enough for apps and OS. In fact, sequential disk numbers have very little bearing on overall OS snappiness.

2. No one needs to worry about SSD wear unless they're crunching large numbers all day. Any SSD is more likely to fail due to other reasons before reaching end of its TBW lifespan.

3. Invest in a decent brand enclosure with a quality cable and you would never have to worry about potential disconnections. I have 3 drives connected to my Mac -- TB3, USB4 and a USB 3 and I've only ever had one disconnection in over 2 years. A new cable fixed it.

Absolutely zero point in giving Apple $200 for a measly 500GB upgrade. I'd max out the RAM over it any day.

I agree. If your workflow is going to require external storage anyway, I don’t see any point in going beyond 512GB internal.

I haven’t seen speed benchmarks on 512GB vs 1TB, though.

 

[Ray2]

250 gb of my internal are MobileSync backups, no duplicates. 120 gb (today) are TM snapshots. Look at more than “your” files. If I was running a 512 I'd be taking a performance hit.

 

[Mike Boreham]

250 gb of my internal are MobileSync backups, no duplicates. 120 gb (today) are TM snapshots. Look at more than “your” files. If I was running a 512 I'd be taking a performance hit.

It's quite straightforward to put mobilesync backups on an external with a symlink.

 

[Ray2]

Seems to me I wrote that very response a few days ago. But that was to someone who discovered he had a problem after he spec'd a small internal.

Not sure if your comment was to me or, addressed to me but directed at the OP.

If to me, I don’t have a problem, 2 tb internal with .7 available.

If to the OP, you’re providing a solution to a problem that’s not known to exist. I’m telling the OP to look and see if there’s more to his space requirements than he thinks.

While symlinks can solve large iOS backups, they haven’t proven to enable recovering files after snapshots are moved. Depending on the OP's TM approach, small internals with large externals can result in egregiously large snapshots. I/we don’t know what he does.

 

[geez66]

I went for mac min m4 Pro with 1tb. My previous Mac mini m1 had 512GB and only had 100gb space. I reckoned I would keep this Mac mini for four or five years and would thus exceed 512GB in the next year or two. But I can also see that thunderbolt 5 (or even usb c) external ssd would probably have been plenty quick enough for storage too.

 

[Mike Boreham]

@Ray2, I mentioned the tip about symlinks for iOS backups for the benefit of anyone who might find it useful. With 250GB it seemed that might apply to you, but fine if not. You hadn't mentioned 2TB internal.

 

[Ray2]

I’ll thank you for everyone. With Apple's egregious RAM/storage upcharges people get attracted to smaller drives. Couple that with the advent of iPhones with tons of storage, an iOS backup can kill a small drive.

 

[bearcatrp]

As time goes, you will start to see your HD shrink as OS updates always add more lines of code, thus larger files. Been watching my M1 mini slowly lose space as I upgrade the OS. Glad I went with a 1TB when I got it a few years ago. When I do order a M4 mini, will still do a 1TB drive. Already have a hub with 4TB storage.

 

[Fishrrman]

If you're got enough $$$ to get the m4pro Mini, then you can probably find $200 more for the 1tb SSD.

Just as I used to say:
16gb is "the new 8",

Now it's time to add:
1tb is "the new 512gb" ...

 

[Fomalhaut]

Hmmm, your replies have given me a few things to consider….

There are, in my experience, quite a few “stealthy consumers” of disk space in macOS, including iOS backups and TimeMachine snapshots, but also cloud storage offline files “hidden” in the user Library, which can be a big deal. I have at least 50GB of documents that I want to be available offline (to avoid download latency over a slow internet connection).

It may well be possible to effectively relocate all of the above on external SSDs, but this could make the system more brittle if Apple changes anything in macOS.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Highlighting my question of iCloud offline files above, do any of you know whether these files (found under ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs ) and other cloud storage files under ~/Library/CloudStorage can be moved to external storage using symlinks or aliases?

 

[iamthedudeman]

Get 512gb. Same speeds as the 1TB and get an external TB4 or TB5 enclosure. Good to go.

 

[awsom82]

I ordered 512GB for my brother, but he asks for 1TB. And it was a big mistake.
Spec it nice, or buy it twice! rule works.

 

[Fomalhaut]

I ordered 512GB for my brother, but he asks for 1TB. And it was a big mistake.
Spec it nice, or buy it twice! rule works.

The "mistake" you made was that your brother asked for a 1TB SSD and you bought a 512GB version....

Apart from that, I think we've established that there is only a small performance penalty if choosing the base 512GB SSD, and expanding the storage with a fast TB4/5 external SSD.

I understand there *is* a small latency difference between internal and external SSD access via TB4, but this is probably not something you would notice in normal use. If you hammer your disk with small data accesses (e.g. running a DB server), then this might become relevant, and then so would SSD TBW limits which might well lead you to choosing an external SSD in any case to avoid prematurely killing the internal one with excessive write volumes....

I've just ordered an M4 Pro with the base 512GB after some deliberation. My rationale is that the machine is *always* going to be connected to external storage (NAS and DAS), so the size of the internal SSD is not so important provided it has the following 3 properties:

(1) Large enough for all apps and cached data
(2) Has fast enough performance for both sustained transfers and high volumes of small read/writes (IOPS), and low enough latency to ensure optimum OS / app performance
(3) Has sufficient TBW limits to comfortably exceed the expected lifetime of the machine

 

[EugW]

As someone who had a 1 TB M1 Mac mini for a couple of years, I will say that 1 TB was either too little, or too much. The biggest factor for me is I have a large Photos Library, and if I put it on the internal 1 TB drive then it was very cramped. However, if I moved the Photos Library to an external drive, that meant I had something like 775 GB left on the internal drive. Anyhow, working with a cramped internal drive wasn't ideal obviously, so I attached a Samsung T7 Shield 2 TB external USB 3.2 SSD and kept the Photos Library there. It felt like such a waste having 775 GB of empty space on the internal drive though.

So, for my M4 Mac mini, I went with 512 GB internal, and a 4 TB external USB 4 SSD. My internal SSD has 290 GB free.

The one issue that crept up on the M1 Mac mini though was that the Samsung 2 TB USB 3.2 drive would occasionally disconnect at sleep and then automatically reconnect at wake. However, this would give me a disconcerting error message on wake, and very occasionally Photos would stop syncing with iCloud, requiring a reboot. After the reboot, when I launched Photos again, it would fix the database and start re-syncing again.

I'm happy to report though that with the M4 Mac mini and the 4 TB USB 4 drive, I have had none of these disconnects on sleep. I'm using a Chinese DIY enclosure (Qwiizlab branded but I believe manufactured by Colorii in Shenzhen - here and here), with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD.

 

[hajime]

As someone who had a 1 TB M1 Mac mini for a couple of years, I will say that 1 TB was either too little, or too much. The biggest factor for me is I have a large Photos Library, and if I put it on the internal 1 TB drive then it was very cramped. However, if I moved the Photos Library to an external drive, that meant I had something like 775 GB left on the internal drive. Anyhow, working with a cramped internal drive wasn't ideal obviously, so I attached a Samsung T7 Shield 2 TB external USB 3.2 SSD and kept the Photos Library there. It felt like such a waste having 775 GB of empty space on the internal drive though.

So, for my M4 Mac mini, I went with 512 GB internal, and a 4 TB external USB 4 SSD. My internal SSD has 290 GB free.

The one issue that crept up on the M1 Mac mini though was that the Samsung 2 TB USB 3.2 drive would occasionally disconnect at sleep and then automatically reconnect at wake. However, this would give me a disconcerting error message on wake, and very occasionally Photos would stop syncing with iCloud, requiring a reboot. After the reboot, when I launched Photos again, it would fix the database and start re-syncing again.

I'm happy to report though that with the M4 Mac mini and the 4 TB USB 4 drive, I have had none of these disconnects on sleep. I'm using a Chinese DIY enclosure (Qwiizlab branded but I believe manufactured by Colorii in Shenzhen - here and here), with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD.

Have you found out what caused the drive disconnection on the M1 Mac Mini at sleep-wake and why the M4 Mini has no such problem?

I used to use 1TB for over 10 years but I am considering to get a 512 configuration with an external.

 

[EugW]

Have you found out what caused the drive disconnection on the M1 Mac Mini at sleep-wake and why the M4 Mini has no such problem?

I used to use 1TB for over 10 years but I am considering to get a 512 configuration with an external.

I don't know for sure, but on the M1 I was using Samsung USB 3 drives, and on the M4 I am using a USB 4 ASM2464PD enclosure with Samsung NVMe drive.

Other people have reported that they occasionally get similar disconnect behaviour with USB 3 drives, but not with Thunderbolt drives. USB 4 adopts most of the Thunderbolt standard, making it very different than USB 3, so that could explain it.

 

[awsom82]

if you happy with external go for 512GB, but I found all external is quite a marketing thing. Better spec machine and use it without any external BS. It's much more easy and just works. So, on your side I will go for 1TB minimum.

 

[Fomalhaut]

if you happy with external go for 512GB, but I found all external is quite a marketing thing. Better spec machine and use it without any external BS. It's much more easy and just works. So, on your side I will go for 1TB minimum.

In what sense are external drives “a marketing thing”? They either meet their specifications or they do not.

There is no technical reason why the external drives can not work at close to the limits of the underlying protocols, provided the controllers are correctly implemented and the SSDs operate within their thermal limits (active cooling helps of course)

If anything the “marketing spin” comes from Apple who claim that their internal SSDs have some kind of magical properties.

If Apple had more reasonable markup margins on their internal SSDs (even 50% more than an equivalent Samsung etc) more people would just upgrade….but they don’t! Paying 2-3 times the price for similar storage just feels like a rip-off.

 

[dcpmark]

I didn’t really have a choice, as my current 1TB 2019 iMac had 628gb on it. Sure, I could start going through it and getting rid of stuff, or move things to an external drive, but I’m already getting a 4TB SSD for my external drive to consolidate all the other 1TB SSD drives I’ve collected over the years. 😂

 

[ben2e]

Does the 512g model have an advantage over the 256g if you're already going to add an external SSD ? I know there's some differences in how the drives are mounted internally (two pieces vs one) but not sure it's noticeable. If you put your iPhoto library (or whatever your media manager of choice) on the external drive, wouldn't 256 be enough ? $200 for that extra internal storage is steep.