Let's face it, this is the best bang for the buck Mac ever - but adding extra storage, as always with Apple, is crazy expensive.

What is everyone else doing RE external storage? My experience of this tells me you *never* hit the advertised max speed of an SSD, so I guess 65% ain't too bad for external. Is that about the best I can expect? - I'm thinking it probably is, but it begs the question, whether I should've opted for faster SSD's? - but then, price right? - £156 for 2tb of SSD is pretty damn good. Possibly the el-cheapo usb-c to sata cable I got is at fault, but I wouldn't expect to ever hit the max speed. Total for both connection options was about £20, so no big deal. Oddly enough, the usb-c connected to a thunderbolt 3 port, only hits around 320MB/s read/write, yet the USB-A external enclosure hits 360MB/s - go figure. That'll do for now, whilst I search for something a little more fitting & sexy - there's a TON of expensive junk enclosures out there. One will be local backup, the other for data.

I opted to go a bit cheap and got a usb-3 enclosure and a usb-c to sata cable, for each drive respectively. These are never going to even get close to the onboard SSD chips - max 560/510 MB/s - I knew that. Hey, just got my base model Mac Mini M1 today.Īs it is the base model, with just 256gb (although 256gb of *smoking* ssd performance - 3200MB/s write, 2800MB/s read!!), I ordered two reasonably priced crucial 2tb drives (mx500 on a deal at £156 each - about $212 USD).

Best external ssd mac mini m1