Is 256gb SSD enough?

[Solarflares]

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.

Well, the biggest bang has to be the superb 16-core M4 Max Studio, but I guess an M3 Studio Ultra with 8TB/16TB might just top the SSD charts.
God knows I thought about the M3 Ultra a lot, but the M4’s superior single-core speed won the day, and 3GB/sec + internally, is a winner for me. That’ll do a 24-bit Drumkit, with 100 Audio tracks, and masses of plugins all day.
Strong reports of Cubase not assigning cores very well on the high core-count Mac’s, that sealed the deal for me. I saw many videos with Cubase using all 10 of the M4 Mini’s cores at 100%, but the multiple-core Pro/Max/Ultra boys were struggling at 27% processor utilisation.

Interesting that the base Mini M4 is slower with 1TB than a 512GB. That’s why I say 24GB/512GB is the sweet spot.
Possibly a rule of thumb is that doubling the offered standard SSD size - gives an appreciable speed boost on most models? But we’d have to leave out the M1 there, as it is a different beast.

I can’t remember the source of the chart, and I certainly didn’t compile it myself. It just ‘arrived’ on my screen one night, when researching M4 Minis. My main info I wanted was to do with fan-noise, and I bought the base M4 Mini over a used M4 Pro mainly for that reason, with a sub-$1,000 budget in mind. Having experienced the OWC 1M2/990 Pro on the Mini’s TB4, I then wanted comparable internal SSD speeds. So have since replaced the base Mini M4 with the 24/512, and it made a big difference. So much so, that with only a total of 200GB of data/samples - I’m ditching my RAZER TB4 hub and OWC 1M2, to go totally ‘in the box’.
The 24GB of RAM will allow me to load all samples into RAM too - so no more live-streaming samples from the SSD, which will keep working temperatures down, and hopefully increase longevity on a computer that isn’t internet-based, and mainly reads once per session from internal storage.

As I said elsewhere, selling all my NVMe peripherals will pay for my M4 Mini upgrade, and gave me $200 to play with - so very happy now.
Glad I went through the learning-curve anyway. I posted that chart mainly to help others consider internal vs external storage on a machine that isn’t writing all the time. I think internal size wins there.
I definitely got caught up in a retail-therapy tech-frenzy with the OWC 1M2, and RAZER hub, and was a little excitably impulsive after getting the fast base Mini M4. Throwing unnecessary peripherals at it like mad. Only thankful I didn’t have a Pro with TB5! Lol

 

[Cape Dave]

256GB MAY be enough. But the problem is, the question should be, "Is 165GB enough? Because the OS takes up what, 30GB or so? And then you need some empty space so that the ssd does not bork itself. So, is 165GB enough?

 

[bzgnyc2]

256GB MAY be enough. But the problem is, the question should be, "Is 165GB enough? Because the OS takes up what, 30GB or so? And then you need some empty space so that the ssd does not bork itself. So, is 165GB enough?

Agree as mentioned previously, take 80% of the internal drive's capacity and subtract 50GB and that's what's left on the internal drive for the user and 3rd-party apps. The latter of which may be a few hundred to a few GB (e.g. MS Office) or 100s of GB+ (most commonly games). For 256GB storage internal, that's means the 150GB left may be plenty or may not even hold the primary app.

That's of course just the internal. Someone who deals with lots of very large files may not need a large internal drive because they already have a plan to keep all those files external.

And if the work is just browsing and typical office documents, 100 GB remaining after apps could be fine. You have to write a lot pages in Word to fill that up. Or it could go very quickly with RAW photos, videos, large datasets, and/or VMs.

As someone else summarized, the answer to whether 256GB internal is enough is "it depends..."

 

[Meedoss]

Interesting that the base Mini M4 is slower with 1TB than a 512GB. That’s why I say 24GB/512GB is the sweet spot

You mean 16/1tb is slower than 16/512? What about 24/1tb v 24/512?
Where are you getting this from?

 

[Meedoss]

Is 512gb enough if you have used 260 gb now. I don’t want externals would just get 1tb.

 

[Ifti]

With the way external NVMe SSD prices are rising, they are starting to make even Apple SSD Upgrade prices look 'decent'!

Whether 256GB is enough comes down to personal use case - I went with 1TB in my Mac Studio, but I rarely go over 150GB [if ever] and have plenty of fast TB5 external storage too. Personally, I would always go with 512GB as an absolute minimum for an internal drive.

 

[grad]

Is 256gb SSD enough?

Short answer: no, it isn't
Long answer: no, it is not