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.
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Is M4 Mini Base model with an external storage sufficient to serve as a NAS?
- Thread starter hajime
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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?
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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.
I'm looking to do the same, right now I'm running a Ugreen NAS but the fan and HD noise has become irritating when I'm trying to sleep especially during the winter with the AC off. I'm thinking of using my M4 MM with an extra 2TB stick SSD to store documents and music. Not only that but the Mac Mini's power draw can go down to 4w per hour while the Ugreen's lowest draw is 20w so I would be saving a few pennies a year in doing so. And I haven't touched the Mini in a few weeks because I started gaming again.
Now all I have to do is finish setting up the MM which feels simple enough on paper but after following the instructions it's still not showing up in my network. So at least I'll have something to figure out when I get home...
Now all I have to do is finish setting up the MM which feels simple enough on paper but after following the instructions it's still not showing up in my network. So at least I'll have something to figure out when I get home...
Way beyond sufficient ... this is an incredibly overpowered NAS.
My Xeon based TrueNAS build is still running and working wonderfully from nearly a decade ago.
My Xeon based TrueNAS build is still running and working wonderfully from nearly a decade ago.
Yes, it could work but it is not cost effective and it can't do much more than share files. There are better and cheaper ways to go.