Would there be issues maxing out the Thunderbolt bus if you had a couple high-res external monitors?
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.
New Mac Mini's Storage Can Be Upgraded, But It's Not Easy
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Any perceived energy efficiencies are cancelled out by the lack of upgrade or repair potential in these sealed units. It is like the dichotomy of many electric vehicles - seemingly cheaper and therefore greener to run until you look at the overall carbon footprint and then it isn't so clear. Most of Apple's innovation seems to be in extracting money for old rope these days. The Studio and Mini have modular storage. Apple does not allow any post purchase upgrades in that department although there are no technical barriers to this as we have seen. You cannot defend this.
And do you consider “using a heat gun” as upgradable? It is actually dangerous, because you could affect something else inside
It doesn't make sense if all you want is a 512GB SSD, but the 2TB SSD is an $800 upgrade and you might even be able to upgrade to 4TB which Apple doesn't offer for the Mini, but if they did it would be a $1600 upgrade.
You probably need a lot of experience working with electronics if you don't want to de-solder the surrounding components.
I think the hope is, that there will be a market for those Mac mini SSD boards. Switching the whole SSD part should be possible, even for amateurs. You only need a prying tool and a couple of torx drivers for that. It's definitely a lot easier than taking apart the glued screen on recent iMacs.
Nobody is going to do this procedure to upgrade to 512GB. The 2TB option on the other hand is an interesting business case, considering the prices Apple charges. It could be a nice opportunity for professional electronics repair shops.
Each Thunderbolt 4 or 5 port (depending on which M4 Mac Mini model your get, as M4 Pro = Thunderbolt 5 and M4 chip - Thunderbolt 4 has ports) is independent with its own controller on the M4 Mac mini. So there are 3 ports each with its own dedicated Thunderbolt controller chip (as seen on the tear down videos) and they do NOT share bandwidth with each other. Each port should have up to the full 120 Gbps data speed. Thunderbolt 4 maxes out at 40 Gbps, while Thunderbolt 5 maxes out at 120 Gbps for each monitor, or 80 Gbps for data transfer. With some data overhead taken into account, they should realistically top out at with a data rate of ~3,200 MB/sec on Thunderbolt 4 and ~6,400 MB/sec on Thunderbolt 5 for SSD drives that support the maximum Thunderbolt speed.
I have experienced problems connecting more than 2 passive (bus powered) cabled Thunderbolt 3/4 SSD drives directly to a Mac Studio M2 Max. Not sure if that same 2 bus-powered Thunderbolt 3 or 4 SSD drive limit applies to the new M4 Mac mini. You can get around that by connecting your Mac to a Thunderbolt hub, which has its own power, to power the bus-powered Thunderbolt 3 or 4 SSD drives, if lack of power for the external SSD drives is a problem for you.
I'm curious. Did you already have stability problems with two Thunderbolt drives connected to the Studio? Or did the problems with the power supply occur only when you connected three external SSDs?
Could you maybe share the specific model of the external drive you used with your Mac?
They always have super conservative ship times when it’s quite a ways beyond launch day and then they almost always beat them. Makes for a great surprise and delight moment for consumer
The title of this thread should really be, because of a slow news day "New Mac Mini's Storage Can Be Upgraded, But No One Is Really Going To Do It". 🤪
It seems the critical part of the instructions are to be sure you are in DFU mode. If you are in FU mode, then you are definitely F'd.
I sincerely don't understand how consumers defend a company that clearly is showing they don't respect you and have zero issues in robbing you blindly.
I am talking about the ones that clicked on "disagree" and "laugh".
That blind devotion simply doesn't make sense to me.
Same thing for the people that are ok with Ngreedia having a monopoly and charging 2 grands for a gaming GPU.
On the subject, why dont we see third party vendors selling such SSDs?
Or maybe I missed it at OWC.
Last edited:
I would rather put my time and expenses into making the monies necessary to purchase the size of an Apple product needed. If I wanted to have a kit, the Raspberry Pi would do nicely. What is really interesting is that many go out and buy a vehicle in less than an hour, spending tens of thousands of dollars. Not to mention a house.
Heck, you might even be able to do 4TB which would save you well over a grand.
I don't get it either
I feel like Apple could charge $1000 for a 1TB SSD upgrade and it would still be defended by folks
Apple storage isn't even as fast as can be had with NVMe now, and it's WILDLY overpriced to boot
Apple is absolutely screwing customers on component upgrade pricing
SCREWING them
Production ramps up.
Apple always under promises. Then you feel a little bit special.
These will sell like tiny little hot cakes.
My take away from the video is, if someone can do it with so little equipment, it is possible to manufacture at industrial scale for much cheaper.
All it takes is for someone to copy the schematic of the surrounding board which houses the NAND chips. Since it does not contain a storage controller, it doesn't seem very complicated in terms of the amount of components you have to connect. That means the cost to design and manufacture this board itself should be quite low. Given enough demand, it seems reasonable to expect someone to build a production line for the board with the NAND chips installed and charge a healthy margin and still be well under Apple's prices for storage upgrades.
The biggest hurdle is Apple's hatred towards after market components. They are absolutely going to take legal actions should anyone try to mass produce this product. Remember the lightning certification was a healthy income source for Apple, and they pressured Amazon to delist anyone selling uncertified cables. You might not ever see an upgrade module being sold by any US-based retailer. But it might show up at some point on AliExpress or other less regulated channels.
Last edited:
It's a desktop, so I'd personally do it like we do video editing desktops at work: 10G Ethernet, NAS, and minimal on-board storage.
If I'm not mistaken, you are still free to make other purchasing decisions that meet your budget and worldview. These are the configurations and the prices they are asking. Nobody is "robbing" you. Apple or NV is under no obligation to make everything cheap for you. Don't buy it.
As much as this Mini is attractive, my loaded 2017 27" iMac still works perfectly, so I'm not buying one, even though I could afford it. I'm fine with that.
In a few months you'll be able to pick up a refurb for ⅔ the price, and in a year or two about half the price.
Yeah that'd be real peachy if it weren't for the endless graveyard trailing out behind this faux-meritocratic tech utopia, strewn with billions of dollars and man hours & all the great innovations & inventions cut short due to the inherent flaws baked into the business world, from unreliable funding, competing interests, big business protectionist lobbying and legal wrangling, IP squatting, & the same problems with personality cults that have plagued this species since the beginning of time.
Building a civilization dependent on technology and then saying all of technologies direction must be in the hands of a few short-term investors & confidence hucksters is foolish. The entire argument for why planned political economies have always ended in disaster also applies to CEO's and investors. No human or computation model has a reliably good track record of long-term market prediction, so if your new goals are deemed high cost/high risk/questionable long-term rewards, then you're either not going to build that thing & build something else, or, you get a government to legislate space for it and take on the $ & risk. This is still how all the big technological advancements happen in our defense & energy sectors. Then once your nation has socialized the cost of sailing around the world, or educating and building the Apollo program, NASA, and all their software and hardware, then your short term profiteers can come in and take bits of it to develop into consumer products for the kids and easy for-profit low orbit corporate satellite launches. But if you're talking about big advances, those have practically all been the product of governments and universities with longer vision & the willingness to work toward them with no reward, rather than the spastic & unreliable business world in the private sector.
No stability problems on the first 2 Thunderbolt 3 SSDs (Both 4TB SanDisk PRO-G40), but adding a 3rd Thunderbolt SSD drive (same manufacturer) got recognized as a USB-C SSD (with 10 Gbps maximum speed) even on a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port. And if I added a 4th Thunderbolt 3 SSD drive to the M2 Mac Mac Studio, only the first 2 got recognized. I believe it was a bus power issue that couldn't properly supply power to 3 or 4 drives without them being connected to a Thunderbolt 3 hub with the power that the hub supplies. So my advice is to stick to a maximum of 2 bus powered (without another power source) external Thunderbolt SSD drives. But your mileage may vary
I still enjoy using mine, and it actually is faster at some items still than my M3 Pro due to my discrete GPU installs. Since Lightroom is GPU aware, my RX580 equipped MP is notably faster at converting Canon CRAW, with edits, and exporting to JPG files.
That said, everything else in my workflow, including FCPx is much faster on my M1 & M3 Macbook Pro models
Id imagine this will be professionalized, streamlined and be on offer for a significantly lower price than apples upsell.
You simply confirmed my post.
I find zero logic on your response.
So I ask, why the devotion to a trillions dollar corporation to the point that you are not only justifying their price gouging but also turns you into a white knight, so you go out to attack other people that don't blindly worship that company?
Because as it is, I can't comprehend such behavior.