I got 24/512GB M4 mini yesterday, it's half full, 256gb wouldn't of cut it.
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Is 256gb SSD enough?
- Thread starter etaleb
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Not enough for me anymore.
I've been thrifty with internal storage on many Mac models. Got 512 GB on my M1 Studio and 1 TB in my Pro M3 14".
It is really bad in terms of storage I/O performance when down to 15% or less free space on any system and OS platform my opinion.
I've been thrifty with internal storage on many Mac models. Got 512 GB on my M1 Studio and 1 TB in my Pro M3 14".
It is really bad in terms of storage I/O performance when down to 15% or less free space on any system and OS platform my opinion.
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Just helped my ex choose a new MacBook Air to replace the 2013 4gb/128gb MBA she's had since 2014. She still had about 25gb free space on the 128gb SSD and thinks she'll actually be storing less as she is semi-retired now. So, we went with the base 16gb/256gb version. Of course, her needs couldn't be more different from mine but I suspect there could be a lot of others out there like her.
For a light user such as the OP, 256GB would be plenty. I would recommend a portable USB-C SSD for a quarter of the upgrade's cost, since it sits on a desk anyway and can be permanently connected, giving way more storage per dollar.
Space fills fast only when you have heavy apps, games, creative plugins, etc.
Space fills fast only when you have heavy apps, games, creative plugins, etc.
I'd say:
You really want to be able to fit your system, apps, app libraries, temporary/cache files on the internal HD. Masses of small files constantly getting read and written to - it's faster than any cheap USB SSD you're going to buy & it ensures that everything will run if the external gets unplugged etc.
256GB is fine for basic "personal productivity & communications" or if you live in the cloud, but the system and apps will take a chunk out of that - and, as @Cape Dave pointed out above, you really, really don't want your system drive to get anywhere close to full - drives need free space to work efficiently and that goes double for SSDs which need copious free space for housekeeping. So you want some headroom.
If you're doing more than the basics, I think 512GB internal is the realistic minimum. Install a few "pro" applications (which can take 10s of gigs), developer tools, games or start messing with virtual machines, 256GB can soon get >> half full. Yes, you can re-direct a lot of things to an external drive, but that's a hassle every time you install software and means things won't work if the external HD isn't connected. I think this is becoming an issue with the Mini now because the base M4 is otherwise capable of so much more than the basics. It's a pity that it's so expensive - an extra 256GB shouldn't be an expensive luxury that you have to quibble over, yet it's somehow the same price as a 512GB to 1TB upgrade...
1TB is a nice luxury if you don't want to mess about keeping stuff on external drives. And, of course, if you're buying a Studio or M4 Pro Mini with 512GB base it's "only" the same $200 as the (extortionate) 256-512GB upgrade. Frankly, at least until SSD prices started going silly in the last few months, there was no excuse for this not to be the default in all but the cheapest Macs.
If you don't know why you might need more than 1TB then you probably don't need more than 1TB. If you have a valid reason, fine. However, you're starting to put a lot of eggs in one basket (which will live and die with your Mac - even if you pull the modules they are unreadable).
The economics might be slightly different with a laptop - where you don't really want to plug in an external every time you sit down - or an iMac (...why restrict yourself by buying an all-in-one if it isn't really all-in-one?).
You really want to be able to fit your system, apps, app libraries, temporary/cache files on the internal HD. Masses of small files constantly getting read and written to - it's faster than any cheap USB SSD you're going to buy & it ensures that everything will run if the external gets unplugged etc.
256GB is fine for basic "personal productivity & communications" or if you live in the cloud, but the system and apps will take a chunk out of that - and, as @Cape Dave pointed out above, you really, really don't want your system drive to get anywhere close to full - drives need free space to work efficiently and that goes double for SSDs which need copious free space for housekeeping. So you want some headroom.
If you're doing more than the basics, I think 512GB internal is the realistic minimum. Install a few "pro" applications (which can take 10s of gigs), developer tools, games or start messing with virtual machines, 256GB can soon get >> half full. Yes, you can re-direct a lot of things to an external drive, but that's a hassle every time you install software and means things won't work if the external HD isn't connected. I think this is becoming an issue with the Mini now because the base M4 is otherwise capable of so much more than the basics. It's a pity that it's so expensive - an extra 256GB shouldn't be an expensive luxury that you have to quibble over, yet it's somehow the same price as a 512GB to 1TB upgrade...
1TB is a nice luxury if you don't want to mess about keeping stuff on external drives. And, of course, if you're buying a Studio or M4 Pro Mini with 512GB base it's "only" the same $200 as the (extortionate) 256-512GB upgrade. Frankly, at least until SSD prices started going silly in the last few months, there was no excuse for this not to be the default in all but the cheapest Macs.
If you don't know why you might need more than 1TB then you probably don't need more than 1TB. If you have a valid reason, fine. However, you're starting to put a lot of eggs in one basket (which will live and die with your Mac - even if you pull the modules they are unreadable).
The economics might be slightly different with a laptop - where you don't really want to plug in an external every time you sit down - or an iMac (...why restrict yourself by buying an all-in-one if it isn't really all-in-one?).
Yeah my Mac Mini boots off a 4TB T7 and is my iCloud Data backup machine. iPads Pros do all my work. The other advantage of this versus internal is it helps preserve the life of your internal drive. If the internal drive dies, your computer won't boot anymore.
What is the actual cost to produce 256GB SSD versus a 1TB SSD? Like what, a couple more grains of sand? So, maybe an extra ten cents to Apple? I call BS on the whole damn thing. It is artificial manipulation of the masses. Let's say that the feds create a law that Apple must include a MINIMUM of 1TB on any device. I mean, do you think that Apple would feel anything? Other than maybe a miniscule rounding error that would probably actually work out in their own favor due to decreased costs of having to carry different sizes of SSD.
I estimate the marginal difference in BOM for 1 TB versus 256 GB between $75-100.
Apple's incremental price for upgrading internal storage on most Macs is now typical for branded vendor supplied hardware: $300-400/TB ~ 2x market. Granted this is partially because market pricing for SSD (RAM, etc) has skyrocketed and Apple's prices have not (yet?).
Also this mainly holds true for the 1->2->4->8 TB upgrades. The upgrade pricing for 256->512 GB upgrades seem to be based on pricing the 256GB models as "doorbusters" and consequently the next step up out of the base is a bit of a jump.
I am just estimating based on the difference in price of better quality NVMe SSD. My guess is that those prices reflect a small but non-0 markup over wholesale and the difference in price roughly correlates to the cost of the higher capacity components with markup. Also my impression is that Apple does use high quality NAND. If someone has actual wholesale market data of course please chime in.
Nobody who knows how much Apple pays for its chips will post that info for free on the Internet - they're probably one of the biggest consumers* of flash and RAM and are in a strong bargaining position & you can bet that their supply contracts will be Machiavellian and a lot more complex than "$x per 256GB chip". What you can count on is that they are paying a lot less than the retail cost-per-GB of M.2 modules or any component seller willing to sell you a mere few thousand loose chips.
In the past, their upgrade prices have been several times over retail for comparable (i.e. the fastest) M.2 modules - and pretty clear based on target price points for good/better/best Mac models rather than anything to do with BOM.
BTO upgrade prices from the likes of HPDelnovo are always gouge-y, but Apple have historically been gouge-y-er.
However, apart from laptops, most PCs use user-upgradeable M.2 modules which have always been much cheaper than BTO.
Until prices went silly a few months ago, pall-park $200 would have got you 2TB of fast SSD from Amazon et. al. Since then, prices have shot up (& availability fallen - with Micron/Crucial pulling out of the consumer market altogether, and they're one of only a small handful of companies that actually make the stuff). Consequently, Apple RAM and SSD prices are now looking merely extortionate, rather than usurious
We'll see whether Apple are big enough to ride the storm at the expense of reduced margins or if they use the opportunity to crank up prices.
* Even with Mac, although they are only #4-5 in PC market share, their product range is very narrow and homogeneous compared to HPDelNovo's sprawling catalogues - same goes for iPhone - so I wouldn't be surprised if they're about the largest single consumer of things like LPDDR5x RAM and whatever NAND flash they're using.
The Mac Studio desktops all look amazing.
I'm guessing it's impossible to buy a current Mac desktop with a regular HDD?
256GB just feels like I'm going backwards a few years in terms of storage...
I'm guessing it's impossible to buy a current Mac desktop with a regular HDD?
256GB just feels like I'm going backwards a few years in terms of storage...
Use a HDD as your main drive (even if you could) and you'll go back 15 years in terms of performance... It's a pity that SSD price-per-GB has never come down to HDD levels, but they did bring a night-and-day performance boost.
Mac Studios start at 512GB - which isn't over-generous in a $2k machine but is workable if you add an external drive.
"I'm guessing it's impossible to buy a current Mac desktop with a regular HDD?"
Those days are done and they're never coming back...
Those days are done and they're never coming back...
And thank god for that. I have one or two I'm still using for archive and backup, and they're fine for that -- but I truly do not miss the days of listening to my hard drive spin up (accompanied by a lovely pinwheel cursor) every time I launch an application or save a file.
Agree, 256 could get really tight, especially when you consider a big chunk of that will be taken out of play immediately by macOS itself.
But since you're talking about desktops, for like $100 you can buy a tiny 1 TB SSD that's quite fast and totally silent. Park that behind your Mac and you never have to look at it again. (You could also save a few bucks by doing this with an HDD, but it's totally not worth it IMO, except maybe as a backup device.)
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SSDs are the biggest improvements in computers for the past 15 years, even more than processors. The performance gained by them is simply night and day. I can't believe someone would like an OS running on an HDD nowadays.
In 2026 (actually earlier) I can't recommend buying new HDD except for large backup/archive use cases and a few other niche situations. I appreciate HDD technology but I think they will go the way tape drives.
I just checked and it seems like after installing the BASE install of macOS you’re only left with about 218GB so the actual number is 218GB
Plus you need to leave some space for macOS updates and it's generally a good idea not to run SSD at 100% capacity.
Practically speaking I would assume 250GB internal storage translates to about 150GB for the user. Of which a surprising amount these days will just be used for data cached from elsewhere. On the flip side, basic office productivity work easily sits within a few 10s GB or less (assuming lots of image or video or large datasets are not involved).
So 250GB can be a lot more than someone needs or not nearly enough...
...because to nobody's surprise the answer to "is X enough" is the usual "it depends".
I firmly believe that 24GB/512GB is the sweet spot for the Mac Mini M4.
Internal drive speed is up to 75% faster than the measly base 256GB internal.
You could get away with a 16GB/512GB model for what you do.
I do music production, and have recently upgraded from 16GB/256GB to a 24GB/512GB machine.
It’s snappier internally, and with the extra space, I now have all my modest sample collection and applications on the internal drive. Whereas before, I needed a fast external NVMe to stream samples that the 16GB RAM couldn’t have coped with.
Like you, I will now utilise an old USB/Sata HDD 2TB for archiving, and have a USB 850 Evo 1TB SSD for Time Machine. Both of these running from a lowly USB2 hub, which powers my keyboard and mouse. I might upgrade the hub to a USB3 perhaps.
I did go down the rabbit hole with a powered TB4 hub and fast NVME’s, but have now dispensed with those, and am really happy working fully in the box.
For you, perhaps 24GB/512GB would also provide some future-proofing against more demanding OS upgrades?
Internal drive speed is up to 75% faster than the measly base 256GB internal.
You could get away with a 16GB/512GB model for what you do.
I do music production, and have recently upgraded from 16GB/256GB to a 24GB/512GB machine.
It’s snappier internally, and with the extra space, I now have all my modest sample collection and applications on the internal drive. Whereas before, I needed a fast external NVMe to stream samples that the 16GB RAM couldn’t have coped with.
Like you, I will now utilise an old USB/Sata HDD 2TB for archiving, and have a USB 850 Evo 1TB SSD for Time Machine. Both of these running from a lowly USB2 hub, which powers my keyboard and mouse. I might upgrade the hub to a USB3 perhaps.
I did go down the rabbit hole with a powered TB4 hub and fast NVME’s, but have now dispensed with those, and am really happy working fully in the box.
For you, perhaps 24GB/512GB would also provide some future-proofing against more demanding OS upgrades?
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I'm gonna be "that guy" and remind you that if you don't already, make sure you have a good, up to date backup of that external drive with the family memories on it
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Interesting chart -- I am curious where it came from? Both its creation and the values reported (which I am guessing were measured by AmorphousDiskMark but were these taken from your computers or did you compile from this forum)?
Interesting that performance actually dropped in many cases from M1->M2/M3 and then only somewhat-to-mostly recovered with M4.
My reading is also that while upgrade from 256->512/1TB improved I/O to varying extents, upgrading to Pro/Max got the biggest bang.