Hello, I know that if using the Mini M4 as a general purpose computer, it is better to upgrade the SSD to 512GB or 1TB. In the case of using it with an external SSD mainly as a NAS for file sharing among multi-platform devices of different OS (MacOS, Windows, iOS, Linux, perhaps also Android), is the base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD sufficient? The storage of my iPhone with 256GB is almost full and I don't use 3rd party cloud services including iCloud.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Is M4 Mini Base model with an external storage sufficient to serve as a NAS?
- Thread starter hajime
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Do you plan to store anything on the internal drive? If no, then it's fine.
Is there a reason you specifically want a Mac Mini to serve as a NAS? With more dedicated devices you can have something designed to have drives attached in mind and to run headless.
Is there a reason you specifically want a Mac Mini to serve as a NAS? With more dedicated devices you can have something designed to have drives attached in mind and to run headless.
Don't plan to store anything else on the internal drive. My concern is that in this case, the Mini serves as a middle person between the external storage and other computing devices. I wonder if its small 256GB internal SSD would affect operations like files copying/transferring. For example, to move a 500GB file/folder, the internal drive needs to be at least 500GB or else performance slows down. Is there such a limitation? When copying/transferring, does the internal SSD serves as a buffer or operations like copying/transferring go directly between the computer/phone/ipad and the external storage?
Last edited:
No, it doesn't work that way. You'll be limited by the performance of the external drive and how macOS treats it. Files will get copied to/from the external drive.
Lots of pre-built NASes have really tiny OS drives, way less than 256GB even. They usually run Linux but the idea is the same.
It's more than sufficient for being a NAS. An M1 is also more than enough. A mini from 10 years ago will also do just fine. Only real reason to get a newer one is if you want 10Gbit networking, but then you'll be limited by Apple's bad SMB implementation. AFP is much faster, but I guess we can't have that anymore.