It’s thrilling as a Mac consumer to dwell in a time when you should buy an M2 Mac mini on the beginning worth of $599 that’s vastly quicker than practically any pc you might need beforehand owned besides sure higher-end M1 Macs. However the issue isn’t the bottom worth. It might sound affordable to leap from 8GB to 16GB of RAM for an additional $200. However if you wish to soar from the baseline 256GB SSD–insufficient for 2023…and even 2018–you possibly can pay a bundle.

Apple prices $200, $400, and $800 to shift upwards to 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB, respectively. Whereas these are even increments, they’re far above the costs paid within the market. There’s no solution to crack up an M-series Mac mini, Mac Studio, or iMac so as to add extra reminiscence or storage, so what you select for RAM is what you’re caught with. However is that the case with an SSD?

Many Mac mini customers might do nicely sufficient with a 256GB or 512GB SSD and make investments their extra cash in an exterior Thunderbolt 3 or 4 drive enclosure with an NVMe SSD drive. With both Thunderbolt 3 or 4, a mid-range NVMe SSD can carry out inside the 40Gbps constraints of these Thunderbolt variations. See our spherical up of the Greatest exterior SSD for Mac 2023.

Most of Apple’s Macs use chips of their SSDds that supply roughly 3 to 6GBps of throughput–Apple claims the Mac Studio may even hit 7.4GBps in some configurations. Mid-range NVMe SSDs can hit about 3GBps, matching that lower-end efficiency. You should purchase a quicker NVMe, however Thunderbolt 4 will throttle efficiency to round 4GBps or so.

(Drive speeds are normally measured in bytes per second, or Bps or B/s, as an alternative of like community and connection throughput, which is bits per second, or bps or b/s. Thunderbolt 3 and 4 provide 40Gbps of throughput in every route concurrently, which, after overhead and knowledge reserved for video, is about 4GBps.)

It’s price calling out the 2023 M2 Mac mini’s 256GB configuration, too: Apple used a single SSD chip, halving efficiency to nearer to 1.5GBps in comparison with the 512GB mannequin and different comparable Macs. Thus an exterior 3GBps NVMe gives you higher outcomes.

A 2TB, 2.8GBps NVMe Thunderbolt 4/USB4 appropriate drive from Different World Computing prices $369–lower than half of Apple’s improve payment for a 256GB Mac mini, double the throughput, and also you get the 256GB drive within the Mac mini besides. (Actually: you can boot off it.)

I can communicate from expertise, utilizing an exterior 1TB Thunderbolt drive with an NVMe SSD as my Mac startup quantity. I might have opted to make use of the interior 256GB SSD on my M1 Mac mini and situated the Pictures Library and different storage folders and libraries on the exterior drive. However I opted to maintain every part in a single place. (I did ultimately need to add an exterior SSD to carry my Pictures Library, nevertheless.)

This Mac 911 article is in response to a query submitted by Macworld reader Greg.

Ask Mac 911

We’ve compiled an inventory of the questions we get requested most steadily, together with solutions and hyperlinks to columns: learn our tremendous FAQ to see in case your query is roofed. If not, we’re at all times in search of new issues to unravel! E-mail yours to mac911@macworld.com, together with display screen captures as acceptable and whether or not you need your full title used. Not each query will probably be answered, we don’t reply to e-mail, and we can not present direct troubleshooting recommendation.