Finally buying a new mac (M4 Mini)

[vince22]

Update: Just over two weeks in.
Not loving the performance. It either performs as well as my old 2017 i7 Macbook Pro or worse. I'm not sure why this is. Back when the M1 came out I thought about buying a machine then and everyone was talking about how those machines screamed compared to the Intel stuff. So I figured by the forth gen M4 I would see a monumental upgrade for me in terms of speed/performance over the i7. I mean if the M1 was touted as so amazing, then the M4 had to be even moreso right? But I'm just not seeing it. I've had finder windows spinning to load up my drives, just now i tried playing a 4K iPhone video in the finder via quicklook and it was stuttering all over the place. Which is worse than I remember on the MBP. I don't know if it's because I'm running all these files off external hard drives or that I'm running the system OS off an external SSD (which I clocked as faster than my internal MBP memory) or that I migrated my machine from the old MBP instead of starting fresh (what a time consuming headache that would be) or what.

Are the gains people are seeing in these M1-4 machines due to running everything off the internal storage? Is that the trick? I mean I would expect some slow downs as a result of running off spinning hard drives for sure, but I was using these same drives on the MBP with less issues. Granted my performance is not terrible by comparison, but like I said it's either the same or worse at times when I expected it to be markedly improved.

So I'm not sure what's up. But I'm still mostly happy with my purchase given the price I paid and just having a second mac around again that can be a desktop. But I'm far from amazed like I thought I was supposed to be, and slightly disappointed. But it could very well just be me having done things wrong.

actually loving mine now, purchased base M4 macmini 256gb $499 @costco, booted external 2TB WD SN850x/Sitachi 40gbs Thunderbolt 4 enclosure ($287 total) and was pretty satisfied with the speed, but found out later Apple pay and Apple intelligence was disabled, so no go for me, booted from internal 256gb again and transfer my home folder to external drive solved apple pay/intelligence issues but didn't liked the internal speed and external Thunderbolt4 runs a lot hotter than i wanted, finally decided to buy 3rd party 2TB internal SSD (Sandisk) $180, so far running flawlessly for months now whatever i throw at it, who knows longevity/reliability though, some blackmagic benchmarks comparison below.

256gb internal



External SSD enclosure



3rd party internal

 

[eltoslightfoot]

I'm running my boot drive off a thunderbolt 4 enclosure. According to the Blackmagic speed test, my performance is capable of up to 12K/60p video. Like I said I clocked it faster than my internal SSD on my 2017 MBP. I realize spinning hard drives are a lot slower, but as I mentioned, I was getting better performance with them when they were hooked up to my older MBP.
That's the part that shocked me. I figured at least the same (which most of the time it is) or better due to the faster processing in the M4.

Are most people just running everything off the internal SSD in their macs and that's what all the hype is about? I can't imagine doing that considering the terabytes upon terabytes of external storage I have. Plus I learned decades ago (admittedly as a Windows user) that you should never be storing anything on your boot drive since it can crash and require a reinstall of the OS. While I've had much better luck with MacOS and have slacked in the years on that philosophy, storing some smaller stuff on the boot drive, I still keep all my video and image files and stuff external.

Spinning drives have to be an issue here. I would test it with just external SSDs and see what the performance is like.

 

[EugW]

I'm running my boot drive off a thunderbolt 4 enclosure. According to the Blackmagic speed test, my performance is capable of up to 12K/60p video. Like I said I clocked it faster than my internal SSD on my 2017 MBP. I realize spinning hard drives are a lot slower, but as I mentioned, I was getting better performance with them when they were hooked up to my older MBP.
That's the part that shocked me. I figured at least the same (which most of the time it is) or better due to the faster processing in the M4.

Are most people just running everything off the internal SSD in their macs and that's what all the hype is about? I can't imagine doing that considering the terabytes upon terabytes of external storage I have. Plus I learned decades ago (admittedly as a Windows user) that you should never be storing anything on your boot drive since it can crash and require a reinstall of the OS. While I've had much better luck with MacOS and have slacked in the years on that philosophy, storing some smaller stuff on the boot drive, I still keep all my video and image files and stuff external.

If you’re not using external TB4 SSD with DRAM, that can also hamper performance.

 

[roxics]

actually loving mine now, purchased base M4 macmini 256gb $499 @costco, booted external 2TB WD SN850x/Sitachi 40gbs Thunderbolt 4 enclosure ($287 total) and was pretty satisfied with the speed, but found out later Apple pay and Apple intelligence was disabled, so no go for me, booted from internal 256gb again and transfer my home folder to external drive solved apple pay/intelligence issues but didn't liked the internal speed and external Thunderbolt4 runs a lot hotter than i wanted, finally decided to buy 3rd party 2TB internal SSD (Sandisk) $180, so far running flawlessly for months now whatever i throw at it, who knows longevity/reliability though, some blackmagic benchmarks comparison below.

256gb internal

View attachment 2513945

External SSD enclosure

View attachment 2513946

3rd party internal

View attachment 2513947 View attachment 2513948

Oh wow that's great info. I didn't realize Sandisk made an internal SSD for the M4 mini. I'm assuming it's not sold directly by Sandisk as that would likely get them in hot water with Apple. But maybe I'm wrong. Still that performance you're getting is great

I'm getting about 2000-2500MB/s on my current external SSD with the TB4 enclosure. Which seems like it's fine, as I said it clocks faster than my internal SSD for my old Macbook Pro, but definitely not as fast as anything you're getting. I would try to clock my internal SDD on the mini accept for some reason I can't boot into it. Even when I load the boot menu it will not go to it and automatically just reboots and goes into my external SSD. So I must have screwed something up when installing Sequoia to the external drive. I still have the flash drive with the OS on it, so i could try booting it with that and the external unplugged to maybe repair it, I just haven't done that yet since the only thing I want to do on the internal is clock it's speed. So it didn't feel like it was worth it to go through all of that just to check that. Especially if it's going to be similar to everyone else's M4 256 drive.