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What external ssd drive is best for a M1 Mac mini?
- Thread starter Yoshiii33524
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We have no confirmation yet. I am almost certain that 2x2 is not supported (it's not part of the Thurderbolt specs and for now it's only supported but a couple of Windows devices) but some people here have reported that 2x2 drives (20Gb) get full gen 2 speed (10Gb) on M1 pro without the 25% penalty ticapall of M1. So I guess it should be expected of M2 pro too.
The big question is if there is any improved with standard gen 2 drives (which is the bulk of the market, as 2x2 is a niche that is probably going to die soon and TB is still way too expensive in terms of GB/$). Will the 25% penalty of Apple Silicon be reduced? Hopefully someone with a M2 pro can confirm that
Thanks so much for the update ..Apple just wants to try and force people to buy their upgraded internal SSDs...So ridiculous ..It amazes me how an m2 has 256gb as a base model...The base should be 512 at the very least!!
SSD prices are dropping and I am thinking about upgrading my acasis enclosure with a 2tb drive. Is there a reliable SSD compatibility list (preferably with speeds) for the TBU401 enclosure? The one on the Acasis website and Amazon isn’t very exhaustive.
Most of these enclosure manufacturers have tables listing a few SSD's (or just one) along with the speeds/compatibility with various Macs/PC's (some show it on their Amazon listing, some on their websites). None are the same and, as you noticed, they are not very exhaustive, and can be confusing, if not conflicting and/or outdated. So I'd say....
First, stick with a PCIe Gen. 4 model since Gen. 3’s typically won’t reach TB3/4 speeds (especially for writing). Second the speeds you will see also depend on which Mac you have. The M1 Max Studio/MBP & M2 MBA seem to reach full TB3/4 R/W speeds (~2.8GBps), the M1 Pro MBP & M1 Mini loses ~500MBps in write speed, and the M1 MBA loses ~1,000MBps in write speed though some results reported here seem to contradict this.
Otherwise the “no brainer” SSD choice is the 980 Pro. Most of the enclosure manufacturer’s show consistently great results for that SSD and some even say “we recommend you use the 980 Pro”...look at the Amazon listings for some of the other "40Gbps NVMe SSD enclosures" like the Ankmax & Siliking. OTOH....
I tested my Acasis TBU401 with the 980 Pro, Rocket 4 Plus & the SN770 with similar results for all three (see post #748 in the "Thunderbolt 3 M2. NVMe SSD Enclosures" thread). The SN770 is the value leader in this group unless you need the fastest possible sustained write speeds (i.e., once the cache fills up) in which case the 980 Pro is the pick from these three.
The SN850x may be a new top pick (see post #757 in the above thread) since it now seems to be priced below the 980 Pro. There's also undoubtedly good choices from some other brands like Kingston, SK Hynix, Crucial... but there's less test results for these and some of the enclosure manufacturers recommend staying away from them though I'm guessing that they're referring to their Gen. 3 models. Post #672 & 769 in the above thread shows great results for the Kingston KC3000 & Firecuda 530.
Good luck and I hope this helps!
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i realize i'm way late to this thread, but up until now i haven't been able to upgrade my mac mini m1 storage due to the ssd prices. i got the 8/256 model along with a 1tb and a 2tb sandisk ssd which i think are the 1000mbps models. at any rate, at the time i discovered a lot of interesting things about ssds (these were my first) and the owc thunderbolt hub. i'm doing this from memory so my figures might not be exact, but i found that when plugged directly into the mac tb port i could get 700-900mbps speed from either of the ssd's. but when i raided them i lost 1tb of the 3tb overall storage, but the speed went up to 1300-1500mbps and i couldn't say no to that.
but far worse was the discovery that drives plugged in via tb on the owc hub lost 200-500mbps of speed compared to being plugged directly into the mini. i literally lost a month posting in owc and other forums and with email with owc support and got zero answers other than 'that's just the way it works'. well, no. it's not.
so today an amazon lightning deal brought the price of the 4tb sandisk extreme pro 2x2 (v2?) down to $290 and i couldn't afford to pass that up since i'd waited two years for the price of a 4tb ssd came down enough. hopefully it'll be here tomorrow although don't get me started on the new amazon terminal near austin where packages go to die.
so now i have to decide how to reconfigure everything once i've found out what speed i can expect from the new 4tb ssd plugged directly into the mini tb port. my priority option is to use the ssd as my new boot drive but that will depend on how much less the speed is than the current 2500mbps of the apple drive.
failing that, next thing to decide is whether to raid it with the 2tb drive plugged in via the owc hub. again, that will depend on how much speed i can gain by raiding it. also, if i understand rightly, doing so would keep it from being the boot drive although i'm not 100% sure about that.
so has anything changed lately concerning these components and is it determined that the mac won't support this 4tb ssd at the claimed 2000mbps or even close? many thanks! /guy
but far worse was the discovery that drives plugged in via tb on the owc hub lost 200-500mbps of speed compared to being plugged directly into the mini. i literally lost a month posting in owc and other forums and with email with owc support and got zero answers other than 'that's just the way it works'. well, no. it's not.
so today an amazon lightning deal brought the price of the 4tb sandisk extreme pro 2x2 (v2?) down to $290 and i couldn't afford to pass that up since i'd waited two years for the price of a 4tb ssd came down enough. hopefully it'll be here tomorrow although don't get me started on the new amazon terminal near austin where packages go to die.
so now i have to decide how to reconfigure everything once i've found out what speed i can expect from the new 4tb ssd plugged directly into the mini tb port. my priority option is to use the ssd as my new boot drive but that will depend on how much less the speed is than the current 2500mbps of the apple drive.
failing that, next thing to decide is whether to raid it with the 2tb drive plugged in via the owc hub. again, that will depend on how much speed i can gain by raiding it. also, if i understand rightly, doing so would keep it from being the boot drive although i'm not 100% sure about that.
so has anything changed lately concerning these components and is it determined that the mac won't support this 4tb ssd at the claimed 2000mbps or even close? many thanks! /guy
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(a) Howard Oakley at https://eclecticlight.co/ has a lot of articles about which SSDs and which configurations are faster or slower using TB hubs. The bottom line seems to be (but this is not an issue I care about enough to follow closely) that there are interactions between SOME hubs and SOME drives, but with the appropriate choices you can work around them.
(b) I have no idea what you performance requirements are, but it's very easy to get obsessed over benchmark numbers when the reality is that for most use cases most of the time, you never hit the peak numbers, and even a "slow" SSD/Hub configuration feels plenty fast enough.
(c) I have no idea how (or why) you are RAID'ing your drives, but with AppleRAID you can concatenate into a JBOD and use all the capacity you have as a single drive. Or you can partition one of the drives into a 1+1 partition, stripe 1TB against 1TB of the first partition, then JBOD the resultant 2TB striped drive with the second 1TB partition to get a 3TB drive with 2TB of higher bandwidth, 1 TB of lower bandwidth.
Of course if you stripe two drives connected to the same hub you're basically wasting your time, you might as well just JBOD; you will only get the doubled throughput if the two drives are connected to different TB ports.
FYI, it's 2,000 MB/s (megabytes/s), not 2,000 mbps (megabits/s). To get that, you'd need USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which the Mac still doesn't support. Thus you'd be limited to USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds (1050 MB/s).
One way to exceed this on the Mac is to use a true Thunderbolt SSD, like the SanDisk Pro-G40 (2700 MB/s read, 1900 MB/s write) (though it's twice as expensive, for the same capacity, as the Extreme Pro, and its max size is only 2 TB).
[Note these are all theoretical maximum speeds; the actual speeds you'd get in practice would be less.]
For a comparaitive discussion of the SanDisk Extreme Pro vs. the Pro-G40,see "Final Words" at:
Note, however, that I'm not sure if Anandtech is considering the data storage or boot drive use case when they said that. You'd need to read the review in detail to determine this. More broadly, you'll want to consider your use case when you read the reviews.
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(c) i have them in raid mode because blackmagick reports nearly 100% speed increase over using either of the two drives separately: 1300-1500MBps vs 600-900MBps. same applies to jbod--twice as fast.
and sorry--i tend to get sloppy with the mbps mb/s MB/s designators.
since i posted this i've continued to search and found some more interesting things. first, sandisk now has a g40 ssd which is thunderbolt but of course the prices are much higher than for the extreme pro and now i have an idea why the extreme pro is on sale.
next, i learned (i think) that in addition to the mac mini m1 not supporting USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 there's a recent thread at apple regarding this specific sandisk model losing all data and users unable to connect to it after a few days or weeks. they blame apple but there's no apple response to these issues. they claim this started with a ventura update and didn't happen if they downgraded to the previous os version.
all this was concerning enough that i attempted to cancel my amazon order but it had already shipped. so tomorrow i'll run my own tests and decide whether to return it or not. but i'll be sure to keep a copy of any data i put on it just in case. i had already decided that using it as the boot drive was perhaps not a great idea and the speed and the possibility of data loss threw that option out. but if i'm not using it as a boot drive i can accept a lower speed and if it'll get 800-1200MBps it will be worth it for the extra storage and that i can replace two drives (1tb+2tb) and plug it directly into the mini tb port without having to use the hub.
so based on my recent research, the new plan is to thoroughly test the extreme pro 2x2 and if it doesn't meet my needs i'll return the 4tb drive and for the same money i can get the 2tb g40 tb ssd and know that apple does support it. i already have the previous models of the sandisk in 1tb and 2tb so i can make up the 2tb difference by keeping one of those plugged in for additional storage. in fact, the attraction of having a tb ssd is very attractive and might cause me to return the extreme pro 2x2 anyway and get the g40 from bhphoto although they're closed for passover now.
here's the raid as target for the blackmagic speed test:
tks for the response! /guy
and sorry--i tend to get sloppy with the mbps mb/s MB/s designators.
since i posted this i've continued to search and found some more interesting things. first, sandisk now has a g40 ssd which is thunderbolt but of course the prices are much higher than for the extreme pro and now i have an idea why the extreme pro is on sale.
next, i learned (i think) that in addition to the mac mini m1 not supporting USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 there's a recent thread at apple regarding this specific sandisk model losing all data and users unable to connect to it after a few days or weeks. they blame apple but there's no apple response to these issues. they claim this started with a ventura update and didn't happen if they downgraded to the previous os version.
all this was concerning enough that i attempted to cancel my amazon order but it had already shipped. so tomorrow i'll run my own tests and decide whether to return it or not. but i'll be sure to keep a copy of any data i put on it just in case. i had already decided that using it as the boot drive was perhaps not a great idea and the speed and the possibility of data loss threw that option out. but if i'm not using it as a boot drive i can accept a lower speed and if it'll get 800-1200MBps it will be worth it for the extra storage and that i can replace two drives (1tb+2tb) and plug it directly into the mini tb port without having to use the hub.
so based on my recent research, the new plan is to thoroughly test the extreme pro 2x2 and if it doesn't meet my needs i'll return the 4tb drive and for the same money i can get the 2tb g40 tb ssd and know that apple does support it. i already have the previous models of the sandisk in 1tb and 2tb so i can make up the 2tb difference by keeping one of those plugged in for additional storage. in fact, the attraction of having a tb ssd is very attractive and might cause me to return the extreme pro 2x2 anyway and get the g40 from bhphoto although they're closed for passover now.
here's the raid as target for the blackmagic speed test:
tks for the response! /guy
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and here's how much speed you lose by going through that crappy owc tb hub. this is the exact same raid array as above--i just unplugged one of the raid drives from the mac mini tb port and plugged it into the owc hub where the other raid drive has been plugged in from the beginning. i was getting prepared to test the new drive tomorrow by freeing up a direct tb port on the mac mini so we'll see if it'll approach the speed of the raid with one member plugged in directly.
I just got a T7 shield 2tb. On an M1 mini (non pro) using the included USB c to USB c cable, direct connection, I'm only getting ~670MB/s both read and write according to black magic. That's formatted with MacOS extended with journaling. (i don't see an option for APFS). Oddly, when formatted with paragon NTFS i get ~800 write but still ~670 read.
Are these numbers low or on par for this combo? Again, that's a T7 shield 2tb and M1 mini, Ventura 13.3.1
i got my 4tb sandisk extreme pro v2 (2x2) in today. mistakes were made getting it integrated. i had two sandisk extremes 1tb and 2tb in a raid0 array meaning it was 2tb total but blackmagic reports a huge (nearly 100%) speed improvement over the single drives alone. i copied that to the new 4tb drive which tested at just over 900MBps and then figured i'd raid in the 2tb drive to get more speed and indeed it went up to over 1400MBps, but i lost that data i'd just copied. i did have another copy on an external traditional hdd ( a vewwy vewwy slow one!) but it took like 4-6 hours to copy 1.1tb od data to the new raid0 array with the new drive.
and then i decided, for some insane reason, to just use the new 4tb drive alone, no raid. well, there was a reason behind it. i had the 2tb drive in the array meaning there was 4tb total space which i expected. but for some reason i decided to undo the raid and put the 1tb drive in instead so i'd have the 2tb drive for spare or for file transfer or for my chromebook. but i didn't realize that with a 1tb drive as a member instead of a 2tb drive the free space went down to 2tb and i couldn't go for that at all. all this meaning i lost my data _again_ and again had to copy it from the spinning hdd. so that's my day done. also, since i'm too ocd to keep the old name of raid0_ssd, i had to re-point all my aliases and links to files to the new named drive.
yeah, i'm an idiot. but i'm retired and have nothing much to do other than watching the weather channel. and i might yet go back to the raid array using the 2tb drive again--i wonder if the huge speed increase reported by blackmagic is valid or not seeing as how it's an array and not a single drive.
and i don't regret the purchase or not waiting for the price of the g40 to come down. when i got my mac mini m1 a 4tb drive was nearly $600 and this one was on sale for $279. and after i learned that mac doesn't support the 2x2 protocol i priced the non-pro version of the drive and it was $329 for 4tb. and who knows, maybe the mac will add support for the 2x2 (unlikely) or i might get another computer down the line which does, so the drive is semi-future proof although as soon as the price on the g40 comes down i'm jumping on the thunderbolt model.
/guy
and then i decided, for some insane reason, to just use the new 4tb drive alone, no raid. well, there was a reason behind it. i had the 2tb drive in the array meaning there was 4tb total space which i expected. but for some reason i decided to undo the raid and put the 1tb drive in instead so i'd have the 2tb drive for spare or for file transfer or for my chromebook. but i didn't realize that with a 1tb drive as a member instead of a 2tb drive the free space went down to 2tb and i couldn't go for that at all. all this meaning i lost my data _again_ and again had to copy it from the spinning hdd. so that's my day done. also, since i'm too ocd to keep the old name of raid0_ssd, i had to re-point all my aliases and links to files to the new named drive.
yeah, i'm an idiot. but i'm retired and have nothing much to do other than watching the weather channel. and i might yet go back to the raid array using the 2tb drive again--i wonder if the huge speed increase reported by blackmagic is valid or not seeing as how it's an array and not a single drive.
and i don't regret the purchase or not waiting for the price of the g40 to come down. when i got my mac mini m1 a 4tb drive was nearly $600 and this one was on sale for $279. and after i learned that mac doesn't support the 2x2 protocol i priced the non-pro version of the drive and it was $329 for 4tb. and who knows, maybe the mac will add support for the 2x2 (unlikely) or i might get another computer down the line which does, so the drive is semi-future proof although as soon as the price on the g40 comes down i'm jumping on the thunderbolt model.
/guy
I don’t remember if read or write but I was getting 800+ MB/s APFS on my M1 Mac mini. However, it was 1000+ on my 2017 iMac.
Have you tried AmorphousDiskMark?
sorry for the necropost.
Is this true for the Crucial X9 as well? Seems reasonably priced for 1TB at $80, vs $85 for 1TB Sandisk Extreme and $100 T7 Shield.
I'm not sure, but I note that Crucial does not advertise the X9 as a drive suited for sustained performance. Crucial advertises the X9 for storage backup. For sustained performance, they recommend the X9 Pro.