I really need to upgrade storage of my Mac Mini M1

[hobowankenobi]

"Date Added" does not work on this ExFAT file format (Tested on Big Sur 11.1 @M1 Mac Mini)​

Thank you for asking. I found the answer to my question. It's ExFAT. And here is the test results for various partition schemes / file system .. (I triple checked the numbers after posting and I tested the one with APFS many times over to be sure)

I'm definitely going to use the GUID-APFS. It's clearly fastest and also because "date added" works on anything but ExFAT.

mbr-exfat​

View attachment 1705026

mbr-extended journaled​

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apple partition map - extended journaled​

View attachment 1705028

GUID-apfs​

View attachment 1705029

Just keep in mind that APFS is one of the least flexible formats. No easy way to use the drive with any other platform, or even older Macs. If that is no worry, you should be set.

As I recall it also tends to do a lot more caching and snapshotting (more overhead, more wear)...but that may only be true on a boot drive.

 

[Deccr]

Just in case you’re interested, here’s a speed test result for my 1TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe drive inside a Wavlink TB3 enclosure. It is directly attached to my M1 Mac mini.

 

[Ethosik]

The T7 still drops down after you go past the pseudo-SLC cache. From a review I found though, it's still able to maintain 550-600 MB/s when that happens

I have heard very very VERY bad things about the Samsung T7 (non touch) version - mostly gets VERY hot and slows down quickly. This is why I still get the Samsung T5. Are the T7 actually good?

 

[rui no onna]

I have heard very very VERY bad things about the Samsung T7 (non touch) version - mostly gets VERY hot and slows down quickly. This is why I still get the Samsung T5. Are the T7 actually good?

I'm still waiting for my order.

It's very simple to build cheaper, more flexible DIY alternatives to the Samsung T5 so I've never bothered with that. SATA-USB adapters are very mature and I already have plenty of spare 256GB-2TB SATA III SSDs (830, 860 EVO and MX500).

 

[Ethosik]

I'm still waiting for my order.

It's very simple to build cheaper, more flexible DIY alternatives to the Samsung T5 so I've never bothered with that. SATA-USB adapters are very mature and I already have plenty of spare 256GB-2TB SATA III SSDs (830, 860 EVO and MX500).

External SSDs don't have TRIM, so from what I recall the Samsung T5 being specifically built for external use has more garbage collection than if I get an 860 Evo and an enclosure. Has this changed or am I remembering it wrong?

 

[rui no onna]

External SSDs don't have TRIM, so from what I recall the Samsung T5 being specifically built for external use has more garbage collection than if I get an 860 Evo and an enclosure. Has this changed or am I remembering it wrong?

All SSDs have garbage collection. I don't think the Samsung T5 would be better at that compared to their internal SSDs. The latest ASMedia chipsets support TRIM over UASP with Windows 10. I dunno about Macs.

 

[Sovon Halder]

Just in case you’re interested, here’s a speed test result for my 1TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe drive inside a Wavlink TB3 enclosure. It is directly attached to my M1 Mac mini.

I would have purchased this but Sabrent 1tb costs 25000INR (~340USD) and there are no TB3 to nvme enclosures in India, at least not that I know of.

I have heard very very VERY bad things about the Samsung T7 (non touch) version - mostly gets VERY hot and slows down quickly. This is why I still get the Samsung T5. Are the T7 actually good?

Can you link to the articles where you read about them being very bad and very hot?
I've noticed them being very hot but didn't notice them getting slow.

 

[Sovon Halder]

My Observations:​

I changed back the default finder window and default download location.
I was doing fairly easy things like, downloading a 4GB video from the internet, extracting a folder of 100 images etc in the SSD directly. And the drive was remaining quite hot, at all times, at the same level of temperature (to the touch).

Also I now think using the internal ssd would be better experience for most tasks in general. So I reverted back to the general download location and finder settings save for the "eject" button.

It is now on my finder window and desk like this. Non ejectable, stuck with with double sided tape. Ready whenever I need.

. . . . .. .

Even now, just for comparison, I haven't done anything in the T7 SSD for the past half an hour, just sitting there and still it's warm to the touch, and the mac mini where I just copied 158Gb data (from my old 3TB hard drive at one go at a constant 150mBps speed) is actually cold to the touch as if the computer isn't even turned on.

. . . ..

(Both the cable & the enclosure support up to 10gbps. Not sure if it's relevant but posting in case anyone wants to know what device and enclosure the data is being copied from & what the connection bandwidth is.)

 

[Sovon Halder]

This video is realtime. I copied a 189GB folder from my internal ssd to T7 SSD.
MacOS reported "about 4 minutes" but actually took 5:30.
And the speed dropped from 740-ish mBps to 520-ish mBps right around 42GB data copy.

@rui no onna @xWhiplash

EDIT: I ran the test again with different 150GB data. Same results. Speed drop after 42GB to the same 510-ish mBps.

 

[pukrnukr]

T7 is a nice device, and relatively inexpensive for an SSD if you don't buy the "touch" model.

Yeah. Everyone is kinda not really listening to what the person wants. Just buy the T7 without the extra touch security. It will be very fast and includes the correct usb c cable to get maximum speeds. And Samsung is a very reliable SSD and often the fastest read and write speeds compared to other drives in the same price range. If you want absolute fastest speed look into OWC thunderbolt enclosure for M2 SSD. They sell one with a single slot and also one with multiple slots to expand down the road. You can buy everything from OWC or stick your own m2 ssd drive in it. This will be as fast as any other drive you can get.
* didn’t see you already purchased the Samsung drive.

 

[Ethosik]

I would have purchased this but Sabrent 1tb costs 25000INR (~340USD) and there are no TB3 to nvme enclosures in India, at least not that I know of.


Can you link to the articles where you read about them being very bad and very hot?
I've noticed them being very hot but didn't notice them getting slow.

Most of the Amazon reviews are actually horrible.

 

[Sovon Halder]

Most of the Amazon reviews are actually horrible.

I'm sure you don't mean what I think you mean, by most reviews being bad.

In Amazon India it has 4.5 Stars from 1450 reviews; 70% being 5 Stars.
In Amazon USA it has 5 Stars from 4000 reviews; 86% being 5 Stars.

 

[Ethosik]

Look at the reviews.

"Don't buy"
"Fast drive with issues"
"Slow and finicky"
"Beyond Awful"
"Drive does not perform as described"
"Not for gaming/editing but good for storage"
"Don't buy"

These drives are a lot of money, so I have been sticking with the Samsung T5 which do NOT have these type of reviews on the front page and I have not had an issue with any of my 6 T5 drives so far.

 

[Sovon Halder]

Look at the reviews.

"Don't buy"
"Fast drive with issues"
"Slow and finicky"
"Beyond Awful"
"Drive does not perform as described"
"Not for gaming/editing but good for storage"
"Don't buy"

These drives are a lot of money, so I have been sticking with the Samsung T5 which do NOT have these type of reviews on the front page and I have not had an issue with any of my 6 T5 drives so far.

Well that is true. It does have a bunch of critical reviews on the ratings section, unlike T5 product page. So the observations are real.

But again, I think Amazon has a weird way of putting ALL the critical reviews up front at the top, irrespective of the credibility of the reviewer.

Also, I think I read somewhere about NVME that with double the speed, nvme drives actually has to run warmer than SATA ssds. Don't quote me on it though.

 

[pldelisle]

Also, I think I read somewhere about NVME that with double the speed, nvme drives actually has to run warmer than SATA ssds. Don't quote me on it though.

NVME drives have a PCI-Express bus, while SATA is ... SATA. SATA is limited to 550 MB/s, while PCi-Express can achieve up to 3500 MB/s. With a NVME drive, your bottleneck will be your USB controller, then the SSD controller (not all can achieve 3500 MB/s, only the high end ones).

Heat is rarely a problem when you have a good enclosure. No worry to have.

 

[Fomalhaut]

That's impossible. You cannot have partition merging with external drives.

The best you can get is an external HDD or SSD.

You could go with https://www.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/ct2000mx500ssd1 with a standard USB3 gen 2 adapter like Vantec NST-204C3-SV. Vantec makes really good enclosures and this could potentially cost less than a Samsung T7 2 TB while maintaining the same good build quality. For the same price, you could get a 6-8 TB external HDD from Western Digital .....

A NAS would be your best option, but that's clearly over your budget.

While it is true that you can't "merge partitions", but can very easily create the impression of a single file system by simply creating soft links to external drives from your root file system. Unix has supported this approach for decades.

e.g. assuming you have an external volume called "mySSD" containing a folder "myMovies"..you could do the following to add your external movies to the default "Movies" folder:

ln -s /Volumes/mySSD/myMovies /Users/<user>/Movies/myMovies

To the OP - if you want your external drive to feel "like an extension of the internal disk", I recommend getting a Thunderbolt M2 SSD enclosure and an NVMe M2 SSD. You should be able to get read/write speeds that are very close to the internal SSD.

 

[pldelisle]

While it is true that you can't "merge partitions", but can very easily create the impression of a single file system by simply creating soft links to external drives from your root file system. Unix has supported this approach for decades.

e.g. assuming you have an external volume called "mySSD" containing a folder "myMovies"..you could do the following to add your external movies to the default "Movies" folder:

ln -s /Volumes/mySSD/myMovies /Users/<user>/Movies/myMovies

To the OP - if you want your external drive to feel "like an extension of the internal disk", I recommend getting a Thunderbolt M2 SSD enclosure and an NVMe M2 SSD. You should be able to get read/write speeds that are very close to the internal SSD.

True for the « impression ».

 

[Fomalhaut]

True for the « impression ».

Indeed, but having multiple mount points for different volumes is logically identical from an OS and application perspective to having a single large volume. It's transparent to the user and software.

Not so long ago, hard disk sizes were so limited that the only way to assign sufficient space to multiple users on a single machine, was to have lots of disks mounted to different parts of the file system, so you would have a root disk mounted at "/", logs under "/var/logs", additional software under "/opt", users under /home or subdivided across multiple sub-directories like "/u01/home", "/u02/home" etc. If you needed more disk space, no problem, you just map the new volume to a new mount point.

This is very common in cloud computing as well. Many VMs don't even have a local root partition on the host machine - everything is on a remote SAN mounted by NFS, and you can keep adding volumes as necessary to increase the storage. The advantage of this is that you can detach your volumes (including the root containing the OS) and attach it to a new VM instance, which means you can quickly swap the volume to a new VM if the old one fails, or you need to do maintenance.

 

[pldelisle]

True. My compute nodes have minimum local storage. Everything is on a NAS. But sometimes there are advantage of bringing the data nearer the CPU.

Local data is never good. And I think that this is one of the reason Apple still sell computers with low storage capacity and charges a premium for anything over 1 TB. They want us to use iCloud, which is a lot more reliable than any external drive you’ll find and is a revenue for them too.

 

[4sallypat]

Damn that is expensive. I can't afford that.

My only goal is to increase the usable storage by couple of terabytes so it feels like the entire system is having one single storage unit.

I use the LaCie 1TB SSD Thunderbolt 1 / 2 drives as I have many to shuttle...

Lack of ports ?
Since I use a 27" Apple Thunderbolt display, I have an extra TB port that I leave connected in the back of the display. Using the Apple TB3-TB2 adapter, it's bus powered and stores all my backups, files, etc...

These SSD were bought cheap and brand new on eBay for $50USD each so I bought 10 of them. Plus they transfer at 10Gbps...

If ever I needed more, these LaCie TB drives can be upgraded with a larger, standard SATA3 SSD or HDD or Hybrid.

 

[OSB]

And the speed dropped from 740-ish mBps to 520-ish mBps right around 42GB data copy.

@rui no onna @xWhiplash

EDIT: I ran the test again with different 150GB data. Same results. Speed drop after 42GB to the same 510-ish mBps.

This is as expected, is it not?
You can check out the performance characteristics of the very-similar T7 Touch here.

Scroll down to "sustained write performance." Basically, after the write cache (42GB) is filled, the drive's write performance drops to ~500MB.

SSD vendors design and build to a wide range of read/write/IOPS capabilities, all of which have tradeoffs; if you're super picky about a particular characteristic, you need to seek out a drive that solves for that. For most people, the tradeoffs Samsung makes with the T7 series are pretty good.

 

[Ethosik]

This is as expected, is it not?
You can check out the performance characteristics of the very-similar T7 Touch here.

Scroll down to "sustained write performance." Basically, after the write cache (42GB) is filled, the drive's write performance drops to ~500MB.

SSD vendors design and build to a wide range of read/write/IOPS capabilities, all of which have tradeoffs; if you're super picky about a particular characteristic, you need to seek out a drive that solves for that. For most people, the tradeoffs Samsung makes with the T7 series are pretty good.

Does this happen with the T5? I have transferred hundreds of GB before and it still maintained ~500 MB/s. Does this only affect the faster drives?

 

[OSB]

Does this happen with the T5? I have transferred hundreds of GB before and it still maintained ~500 MB/s. Does this only affect the faster drives?

I'm no expert, but some quick Googling of a few reviews suggest the T5's ~500MB/s performance is sustained through even very large transfers. If I had to guess, I'd say the T5 probably doesn't have the 45GB chunk of fast cache that the T7 uses to boost performance. There's nothing really wrong with this approach, btw - most workloads don't see frequent, sustained transfers of >50GB files, and I'm willing to bet it's a lot cheaper than making the whole drive out of the very fast stuff.

 

[abhi182]

It's been 6 days and already I've got a warning "storage almost full".

My 3TB HDD sounds like a jet engine when powered on, and hangs up Finder when waking up from sleep, it's very annoying. I need a large storage device for casual use that is QUIET and will be connected to the back of the computer at all times. Nothing serious. I'll store random files, 4k movies, music, documents, maybe games etc - my typical use.

What type of storage should I buy? I'm looking at Samsung T7 2TB / 1TB but not sure if that SSD, or any SSD for that matter is an overkill. Also getting the proper ssd and an enclosure for it to get T7 level 1GBps speed seemed a bit complicated.

Please advise.

EDIT:

My ONLY goal is to make it so, that it feels like I have 1 or 2TB of storage, not just meagre 256GB. Replicating the quality/speed of internal storage till my budget permits. Replicating the quality/speed of internal storage as minimally as possible till my budget permits. I am confused between warranty, longevity, bang for buck and speed of various custom configured enclosure+nvme/sata/m.2 ssd.

External HDD speed is a function of two things:
A) The drive type where m2.nvme SSD >> SATA SSD>>>>> SATA spinning drive
The last option is really not recommended in 2020 as the speed difference is huge (Sequential speeds are around 2500 MB/s vs 1000 MB/s vs 120-130 MB/s in that order)

B) The enclosure type.. Thunderbolt >>USB 3.1 , USB 2 not recommended at all
Also note that USB 3.1 comes in both C and USB A so just USB C does not mean full speed necessarily

If you need really good speeds, you will have to use a m2.nvme SSD with a thunderbolt enclosure - but the latter are really pricey

If you are OK with acceptable speeds, get a m2.nvme SSD with a USB C 3.1 enclosure.. The enclosures run around 3K INR or so.
With such enclosures, you will get more or less same speed as a SATA SSD but price diff between SATA and nvme SSD is small now and getting a nvme SSD leaves an upgrade path open for the future

IMO, you should get a nvme SSD with a USB C 3.1 enclosure
You can move said SSD to a thunderbolt enclosure when prices come down

 

[rui no onna]

Does this happen with the T5? I have transferred hundreds of GB before and it still maintained ~500 MB/s. Does this only affect the faster drives?

Once you get to 1TB+, 3D TLC NAND can easily saturate SATA III/USB 3.0.

On the 250-500GB capacities, I believe sustained is probably around 300 MB/s.

If you do a lot of large sequential transfers (e.g. videos) avoid QLC such as Samsung QVO series. Those go at an abysmal 80MB/s sustained sequential on 1TB and 160MB/s on higher capacities.