Are We Making A Big Deal About The Mini SSD?

[Heat_Fan89]

It will be interesting to see just what exactly this means... will it have a proprietary form factor different from your average M.2 drive? Or will it have a proprietary connector like on the trashcan Mac Pro? Mabe we will all get lucky and it will be a standard, off the shelf blade (probably not).

Hopefully either tomorrow or Thursday someone will have given us definitive answers.

If it has a proprietary connector, do you think someone will make an adapter for it?

 

[tpivette89]

If it has a proprietary connector, do you think someone will make an adapter for it?

It’s possible... they made adapters for the trashcan Mac Pro so a standard nvme blade can be swapped in, so theres hope the same would eventually happen here.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

I am still confused with what I can do with the ports. E.g. this SSD drive
https://www.lacie.com/products/portable-ssd/

Can I use it with the new Mac mini? It says USB-C and not Thunderbolt 3. Is it the same?

 

[Fishrrman]

Heat Fan wrote:
"The reviews were just posted on MR and one of the reviews says that the new Mini uses PCIe storage cards. If that is true and if they can be replaced i'm 100% buying a new one with an i7 CPU."

Nope.
The SSD is soldered to the motherboard and is not replaceable.

How long before folks understand this?

 

[iop]

I am still confused with what I can do with the ports. E.g. this SSD drive
https://www.lacie.com/products/portable-ssd/

Can I use it with the new Mac mini? It says USB-C and not Thunderbolt 3. Is it the same?

USB-C connectors serve both as USB and Thunderbolt on macs. The USB 3.1 gen 2 protocol is slower, but it's still fast enough for an external SATA SSD like the one you linked (you can also buy an SSD and a SATA USB adapter separately, and it will cost you less this way). However, if you want to have an external NVMe drive, you would need one that works via thunderbolt to enjoy the full (or almsot full?) speed. Thusnderbolt adapters/ drives are very expensive at his point and probably won't become much cheaper until many years later.

 

[frostbit3]

I'm not an SSD expert by any means, but i've had an SSD in my Macbook Pro 2013 since the first month I had it. I run 4-5 VM's off of my MacBook everyday and move a lot of small files back and forth onto my Mac and haven't had any issues at all out of the SSD. Performs perfect to this day.