M2 mini - how does external USB storage perform?

[noisedude]

I'm replacing a 2018 base model mini with a new one and am faced with the usual questions about Apple's pricing for RAM and storage upgrades. I'm reconciled to paying £200 for 16GB of memory but considering sticking with the base 256GB drive and using cheaper USB storage.

What do I need to know? Is it a false economy?

It's mainly for cloud storage - syncing large Creative Cloud and Google Drive libraries so I'm not waiting for folders to sync when I'm trying to browse them. What's in them is mainly images used for web design. The machine itself is mainly used for web dev and writing, so apart from light Illustrator/XD/Photoshop use, it doesn't need to be amazing, just snappy/responsive.

Thank you!

 

[Brian33]

considering sticking with the base 256GB drive and using cheaper USB storage.

IMHO, this is a practical way to save money. I took that approach when I bought my iMac in 2016. There is a minor hassle having to manage two storage areas, remembering what is where, but it was easy to set up iMovie and Photos to put their large libraries on my external storage.

You also must remember to think about your backup plan so that both areas are covered. I use Time Machine (easy to add the external drive in) and also make clone backups, which meant I needed two separate backup partitions on my backup drive to clone both my internal volume and my external storage.

As for speed/performance, I bought an inexpensive USB-C enclosure and an M2 NVMe SSD for my daughter's M1 MacBook Air and got read/write speeds of 930 MBytes/s and 899 MBytes/s, respectively. Limited by the USB interface (10 Gbps), I believe. I'd expect your M2 Mini to get the same for USB-C.

If you want real speed, people in this this MacRumors thread have gotten around 2800 MB/s with the right Thunderbolt enclosures (but at higher cost, of course).

Here's what I got:
SABRENT USB 3.2 Type C Tool Free Enclosure for M.2 PCIe NVMe and SATA SSDs (EC-SNVE)
SK hynix Gold P31 1TB PCIe NVMe Gen3 SSD

You could instead go for a SATA SSD in a USB-C enclosure. That would be limited to around 500 MBytes/s due to the SATA interface.

In my guess, 900 MB/s would be plenty fast enough to browse large collections of image files. I think even a SATA SSD would be fine, but it may not be much cheaper than the NMVe (unless you happen to have an extra one lying around).

OTOH, I'm fairly tolerant of "slow" storage. Other reasonable people can have a different opinions on the wisdom splitting your storage like that...

 

[noisedude]

Really helpful, thank you.

I hadn’t appreciated that the tech had moved on from SATA so you’ve almost certainly saved me from a false economy there!

As for tolerance, well I’m tolerating 256GB storage and very slow file previewing/thumbnailing at the moment, so I doubt I’ll be too unhappy whatever happens. It’s pretty tedious when you’ve got a gajillion photos all with nondescriptive filenames!

All my stuff is cloudy but you’ve got me thinking again about my backup plans - or lack thereof - though..