8tb SSD options for new mac Mini

[brandsteve]

The built in 8tb option adds $2,400 which is steep.


Not convinced we need RAID for my wife's creative setup. But fast is always good.

Looking for advice on which solutions we should do our research on.

OWC

G-Drive

Get an external enclosure and build our own

What else should we be looking at?

 

[kschendel]

I'd put an 8 TB Inland drive into a good NVMe to Thunderbolt adapter, maybe the Orico. You'll still be looking at $1200 or so, depending on the SSD pricing of the moment, but I guess it's better than $2400. (It's probably slower than Apple's on paper, too; I wouldn't expect it to be $1200 slower in real usage.)

If you decide to roll your own, I'd try to avoid QLC SSD's if you can. The Inland Gaming Performance Plus is TLC according to the retailer's blurb page.

 

[bradman83]

How fast do you actually need? Even 10 Gbps USB-C is plenty fast for some creative users (graphic designers and photography, likely less so 4k videography). USB-C enclosures can be found for dirt cheap and perform comparably to internal SSDs from 6 years ago. I use one for photography work and I get no lag working with massive TIFF files.

If speed is a must I would say that a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure would be worth the investment for the simple reason that you can move it to a new machine if your current one dies or you upgrade in a few years. The enclosure should still work fine with a future machine and while it might not be as fast it will still be incredibly speedy relative to other storage options out there.

A single enclosure would be fine and more cost effective unless you absolutely need the speed of RAID or want the built in redundancy, otherwise just add something like an 8+ TB spinning hard drive to your setup that you could use for weekly backups.

 

[kschendel]

BTW I mentioned a Thunderbolt enclosure only because so many of the earlier NVMe-USB adapters were garbage. SATA to USB is a solved problem, NVMe to USB not as much. Good ones exist, but may or may not be the default yet.

I suggested an NVMe drive mostly because my quick look at the currently available options suggested that the SATA options at 8 TB were either QLC, or alarmingly expensive for some reason.

 

[brandsteve]

Thanks for the great replies!!!