What ports will the next Mac Mini have? (looking for the best external drive)

Deep Dish said:
I've been using a Synology NAS for about 5 years for long-term backups, but I lost all patience with it as my day to day external storage. I even hardwired my MBP to my router that the NAS is connected to, and the transfer speeds were still awful. I'd prefer to not have to use USB hard drives, but I'm not super tech savvy and I can't for the life of me figure out how to make it transfer faster. It currently takes me 15-20 min for a 2.5 GB file to transfer.
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You are probably running your Synology in a RAID level focusing on data protection (e.g. RAID Level 5). That means that after your data passed the bottleneck of „only“ 1Gb/s Ethernet and its non-negligible overheads, it has to be split up and distributed across multiple disks, with complex checksums to be calculated - all done by the poor NAS’s comparably pathetic main CPU.

Therefore I’d not recommend a NAS for “day to day external storage”. Even if you can optimize to a certain degree by choosing a different RAID level, you’ll never be able to come even halfway close to a simple and inexpensive USB3/4/TB-drive running at 20-40 times the transfer speed and with significantly less overhead while doing so.

Unless you are a very(!) relaxed person or absolutely need a NAS for your use case (e.g. remote work, collaborative work with other people concurrently accessing data for the same project), IMHO it’s best to work on one or more directly connected (or even internal) drives and use the NAS only as backup for those drives, being written to over night or over the weekend by a dedicated backup task/daemon/program running in the background.

Especially nowadays, where DAS drives have seen a significant speed bump, while Ethernet is still more or less stuck with - in comparison - measly 1Gb/s speeds (for mainstream use) and even 2.5Gb/s is already rare, not to mention 10Gb/s.
 
NAS sounds like an overkill for what I need. I think Thunderbolt, USB 4, FireWire or whatever there is in that range will be enough for me. What's the fastest of all of these DAS possibilities by the way? Is it Thunderbolt?

NAS could be interesting if it's just a cable to connect the drive to the computer without too much hassle. I need it to be simple basically. So if it's more work than plugging in a basic external drive, I'm out. ?

In the mean time I've ordered a super cheap 1TB SSD (Crucial MX500) for only 89 Euros. And it's at the top when it comes to tested products by consumer protection and product testing institutes. I can't even sync my devices anymore, so little space I have right now, so I'm glad I found this.
 
Neodym said:
You are probably running your Synology in a RAID level focusing on data protection (e.g. RAID Level 5). That means that after your data passed the bottleneck of „only“ 1Gb/s Ethernet and its non-negligible overheads, it has to be split up and distributed across multiple disks, with complex checksums to be calculated - all done by the poor NAS’s comparably pathetic main CPU.

Therefore I’d not recommend a NAS for “day to day external storage”. Even if you can optimize to a certain degree by choosing a different RAID level, you’ll never be able to come even halfway close to a simple and inexpensive USB3/4/TB-drive running at 20-40 times the transfer speed and with significantly less overhead while doing so.
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Yup, I'm on RAID 5. Thanks for going into detail for me! While frustrating, it's good to know I wasn't doing anything wrong. I'm still kicking myself for investing so much in a RAID system when in reality, a pair of external drives and cloud backups is more than I need. I'm gonna try to convince my friend who still doesn't have the internet at his house to buy it off me and use it as a PLEX server.
 
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