As a Mac user, it’s exciting to live in a time when you can buy an M2 Mac mini for a starting price of $599, which is a lot faster than just about any computer you might have had before, with the exception of some of the more expensive M1 Macs. But the problem is not the base price. It might seem reasonable to upgrade from 8GB to 16GB of RAM for an extra $200. But if you want to ditch the base 256GB SSD, which isn’t good enough for 2023…or even 2018, you can pay the package.

Apple charges $200, $400, and $800 to upgrade to 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB, respectively. Even though these are surcharges, they are much higher than the prices paid in the market. There’s no way to hack a Mac mini, Mac Studio, or M-series iMac to add more memory or storage, so what you choose for RAM is what you’re stuck with. But is this the case with SSDs?

Many Mac mini users could easily get by with a 256GB or 512GB SSD and invest the extra money in an external Thunderbolt 3 or 4 drive enclosure with an NVMe SSD. With Thunderbolt 3 or 4, a mid-range NVMe SSD can operate within the 40 Gb/s limits for those versions of Thunderbolt.

Most Macs from Apple use chips in their SSDs that provide between 3 and 6 Gb/s of throughput – Apple claims that Mac Studio can even reach 7.4 Gb/s in some configurations. Mid-range NVMe SSDs can reach speeds of around 3Gbps, which translates to lower performance. You can buy a faster NVMe, but Thunderbolt 4 will drop performance to around 4Gbps or so.

(Disk speed is usually measured in bytes per second, or bits per second, or bits per second, not network and connection bandwidth, which is expressed in bits per second, bits per second, or bits per second. Thunderbolt 3 and 4 provide throughput 40Gbps capacity in each direction simultaneously, which after the overhead and data reserved for video is about 4Gbps.)

It’s also worth mentioning the 2023 Mac mini’s M2 configuration with 256GB of memory: Apple used a single SSD chip, halving performance, closer to 1.5GB/s, compared to the 512GB model and other similar Macs. So an external 3GBps NVMe will give you better Results.

Other World Computing’s 2TB, 2.8Gb/s NVMe Thunderbolt 4/USB4 compatible drive costs $369—less than half Apple’s 256GB Mac mini upgrade fee, double the bandwidth, and you get a 256GB drive on Mac mini to download. (Literally: you can boot from it.)

I can speak from experience using a 1TB external Thunderbolt drive with an NVMe SSD as a Mac boot volume. I could use the internal 256GB SSD on my M1 Mac mini and put the photo library and other folders and libraries for storage on the external drive. But I decided to keep everything in one place. (However, I ended up having to add an external SSD to store my photo library.)

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Greg.

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