mac mini m4 basic questions

[rb5505]

i noticed the low power setting on the mac mini m4 basic and wondered since it's used primarily for plex, would the low power setting hurt the performance of plex on the mini?

also, what is the best way of connecting a 14tb seagate expansion drive with a plex library, to the mini? and since it's getting close to full, would it be wise to split the library between two of those drives?

 

[Honza1]

How much lower the power can even go? I have mini m4 and when used for media playing it sits at 4-5W. It will use 40W when fully loaded, but that is to get stuff done quickly. Low power mode makes sense for laptops, not really desktops.
Your choice of connecting external drive is, well whatever the existing external drive supports. Use USB-C cable, what protocol will be used depends on what is supported by the drive and cable. Mini can use number of methods.
For Plex, you may want to check in Plex discussion forum how to split large library. I would assume you can use two or more drives, but have no experience. If you cannot use two drives, they sell USB-C enclosures which take two disks and create raid0 so they look like one disk for the mini. Seems to work fine for me - I use that for backup. You would need the special enclosure and two new disks as those get initialized/formated during raid creation.