Recommend me a hard drive...

[Screwdriver]

Or should that be a "firm drive"??

Bit the bullet and bought secondhand Mac mini M1. For all the haters out there, I'm with you brother, it's pretty dreadful but it's what I use so I am sticking with.

It's dreadful because it's completely locked down. Can't upgrade internal storage, can't upgrade ram so I urgently (!) need to create a bootable external "drive". My guess is I ideally need to go for NVMe M.2 PCIe and the Mac has two Thunderbolt3/USB4 (3.1gen2 compatible) ports.

That would be the more expensive option. I will mostly be doing video up to 1080P and 3D graphics applications.

Do I really need these high spec NVMe drives or can I "get away with" slower types of SSD?
Is there a known/recommended specific manufacturer or drive model which is robust/reliable enough for use as a boot drive?
Any good deals out there at the moment?

Same recommendation for a suitable caddy type would be helpful though I am watching a few as I pontificate.

Budget is super tight as usual but I need at least a 1TB boot drive and probably 2TB to be on the safe side. The Mac mini has a ridiculous 256GB internal but just about enough RAM. Getting a second screen running off it is also going to be super annoying. Screen and external drive is ALL of your ports!

Anyhow. Just want to know from people who really know what they're talking about please. I have Google here thanks.

[roadster]

If I understand you correctly you want to use it as an external drive. Going to the extra expense of an NVME interface is pointless so you could use a SATA M.2 card which will be cheaper and much faster than a serial interface can support.
Have a look at this supply and you will see what I mean.
https://www.cclonline.com/storage/solid ... t/1088008/

There are many options for mounting 2280 M.2 cards in external cases with USB type connections and you need to make sure you get one which supports SATA and has the highest possible interface speed to your MAC. I can't advise on this because I have no MAC experience so I suggest that you research carefully and/or wait for other replies.

Good luck.

[Screwdriver]

No. I have Thunderbolt 3 on the Mac Mini. Doesn't even have SATA. It connects directly to the PCIe internal bus. The connection is almost an order of magnitude faster than SATA with 40Gbps data throughput. I was running an eSATA external SSD on my old iMac. Thanks anyway.

I am dithering about spending a chunk of change here. I think the solution is as I wrote above, just wanting to hear from anyone who might know better because I have been out of the game for a while and have no experience with the current crop of NVMe drives.

[gremlin]

M25 J1 - J3 on a Friday evening is a bloody hard drive with all the traffic.

HTH.

[Slenver]

First question... why does it need to be bootable?

Second question, do you really need an SSD? I have a big 8TB TB3 external drive that I store all work files (photos/video/music etc) on, and it's plenty fast enough. I keep library files on the internal drive but they're generally pretty small. Upgrading to SSD would be nice but prohibitively expensive. My internal drive is 512Gb, but I don't even use 256 of that and never have. It's only for apps and library files, everything else is external. Never been an issue.

Getting a second screen running off it is also going to be super annoying. Screen and external drive is ALL of your ports!

All your TB ports, you still have USB, right? What else would you want TB for, aside from monitor and drive? Remember you can daisy chain TB, so can always run a monitor off a drive, which will usually have another TB port for this reason. Plus you have HDMI as well, and the M1 Mini only supports two monitors by having one via HDMI anyway.

[dern]

St Ives, bank holiday Monday.

[the_priest]

Ok. I've installed a couple of NVME PCi drives. You can get the usual 3000mb ones or the spicier 7000mb ones. They are speedy and do make a massive difference in video applications. Read write speeds are far quicker than SSD drives. Worth the money if you do video stuff.

[Screwdriver]

First question... why does it need to be bootable?

Second question, do you really need an SSD? I have a big 8TB TB3 external drive that I store all work files (photos/video/music etc) on, and it's plenty fast enough. I keep library files on the internal drive but they're generally pretty small. Upgrading to SSD would be nice but prohibitively expensive. My internal drive is 512Gb, but I don't even use 256 of that and never have. It's only for apps and library files, everything else is external. Never been an issue.

Getting a second screen running off it is also going to be super annoying. Screen and external drive is ALL of your ports!

All your TB ports, you still have USB, right? What else would you want TB for, aside from monitor and drive? Remember you can daisy chain TB, so can always run a monitor off a drive, which will usually have another TB port for this reason. Plus you have HDMI as well, and the M1 Mini only supports two monitors by having one via HDMI anyway.

All good points thanks.

I am leaning towards a bootable drive due to the way the Apple operating system (Ventura in this case) works. You can certainly offload data from application to a "remote" drive but I'd have to do that for everything or not keep my working documents (3D designs, print files, photos, drawings etc.) in the "documents" folder where they are automatically synched to a cloud backup and shared among my other devices/systems. Same goes for photos though most video applications have a much better/easier media management profile.

I **might** be better off running a cut down boot drive and I definitely should consider offloading my bloated photo/music stuff anyway. My current system is running at around 7-800 Gb, the upgrade has a 256Gb drive soldered onto the motherboard (!). The 1TB+ versions are out of my price range. So having a non-bootable external is a possibility if I put the effort in. I was going to just clone my current main drive...

The bonus in using SSD for video editing as you know is real time effects. That's the biggie for me because I don't want to spend too much time waiting for the machine to catch up. It might be that this M1 Mac will do that anyway but I don't know and I don't want to go through this twice! The entire reason I had to buy a new system is because Fusion 360 is dog slow on a low spec machine. I have to leave my beloved Sketchup and move on to a parametric CAD application. Happy to detail that but basically, I have to.

So speed is going to be a problem certainly for graphics but the Mac Mini has all the graphics horsepower and RAM it needs to run Fusion which has only recently been optimised for the latest silicon/M1 Mac chipset. That's why If I am going to make up a new system, I want it to be future proof and I need to to be fast enough for me not to be too frustrated with Fusion/Resolve etc.

Sadly all my TB ports will be booked solid. There are precisely two! One will be for a second monitor, the other for external HD. It has a couple fo USB3's (I think) but that's shalott. It's a budget machine.

I need iPhone connection/charging/sync, second (burner) iPhone, iPad, laptop, mini label printer, GoPro, keyboard, SD card reader yadda yadda. I have two 6 way USB extenders fully populated on my current desktop. Probably because I am lazy but this is my workhorse and I will be running a business off it (I hope) so I like to be able to connect everything, everywhere all at once, to coin a phrase...

You are quite correct regarding HDMI+one TB but I can't daisy chain off my lovely (old) cinema displays. They have a couple of elderly USB sockets and two FireWire ports, assuming you connect the flying leads to your precious USB 3.2 sockets (which is a bit of a waste). I may discover I can stick the monitors right at the end of "the chain" but I need to get the basics done right first and I never assume anything: having USB 1.0 anywhere on the chain might bring the whole shebang tumbling down. We're in the realms of guesswork now, I should stop waffling.

I was pleasantly surprised how affordable even decent spec NVMe drives are so I hesitate to go cheap unless there is a hidden bonus like longevity or somesuch in going for a cheaper eSATA off a USB caddy solution. Ultimately I intend to build a FreeNas system tucked away somewhere to offload films and archive media etc. but that's way off in the distance.

[Greenman]

The hardest drive known to man!

[roadster]

No. I have Thunderbolt 3 on the Mac Mini. Doesn't even have SATA. It connects directly to the PCIe internal bus. The connection is almost an order of magnitude faster than SATA with 40Gbps data throughput. I was running an eSATA external SSD on my old iMac. Thanks anyway.

I am dithering about spending a chunk of change here. I think the solution is as I wrote above, just wanting to hear from anyone who might know better because I have been out of the game for a while and have no experience with the current crop of NVMe drives.

Sorry I didn't make it clear that the SATA protocol is only used within the external device where it is translated to USB serial format. The computer doesn't see the SATA interface directly.

[Screwdriver]

Sorry I didn't make it clear that the SATA protocol is only used within the external device where it is translated to USB serial format. The computer doesn't see the SATA interface directly.

This is not correct. SATA is a dog slow serial interface. M.2 is merely a form factor.

SATA is nowhere near the "highest possible interface speed to your MAC" not even close. Everything is going NVMe so far as I can tell and that connects directly to the PCIe bus. Thunderbolt is the fastest connection I have and I only have two sockets so I need to be careful with my choice of peripherals or I will be wasting performance.

I find this new world confusing enough without muddying the waters. I know what I know of course which I detail above. I have no idea what I don't know about this new technology so am hoping for some insight before I take the plunge and configure this new (to me) system. Your comment that "the SATA protocol is only used within the external device where it is translated to USB serial format" makes no sense to me and looks wrong frankly.

One thing is clear, SATA is slow, whether it is "compatible" with NVMe or comes in an M.2 form factor or not is immaterial. It uses the slower serial ATA protocol which these latest NVMe devices do not. I have the attention span of a butterfly so can only spend a certain amount of effort getting this right before I will just "fuckit" and make a purchasing decision (which I will have to live with).

A quick toe in the water look at USB 3.2 (gen1, gen 2) leaves me cold. There are similarities with TB3 (especially USB4). But I know how far down the rabbit hole you need to go to truly understand how to configure a system to maximise performance and frankly, that is not a priority for me. I just want to make sure I don't buy a Ferrari and run it on chip fat oil iyswim.

[Screwdriver]

I can't believe this was only yesterday??

WTF. Anyway, feels like I have been dithering about this for ages and with it being a lazy Sunday and eBay staring at me all day, I thought fuckit, I just bought a sensible combo:

WD Blue 2TB PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSD
OWC Envoy Express NVMe M.2 Thunderbolt3 SSD External Enclosure

That should give me a 2TB ultra high speed external drive which I can either set up as the boot drive or use for media only.

Easy option is to just make it the boot drive and be done with it. I don't see any down side performance wise and it just makes things so much easier because the Mac really wants to put things where it wants to put them, plus the crushing security protocols mean you can run into permissions problems with system files on non-system discs.

Anyhow, it's done, thanks for all the replies. Even if I disagreed, it meant I needed to research a topic to make sure I understood.

[the_priest]

My personal experience of NVME is that is the route I am going to go next PC upgrade. at the moment I have a 9 year old Xeon CPU with 16GB DDR3 and it is still fast enough for my word processing, YouTube watching habits. 2k monitor and I'm happy. But the NVME is seriously quick with data transfer and the way to go for video file editing. Enjoy!

[Screwdriver]

Dammit. Two days after I bite the bullet, an item typically so far out of my budget, I was resigned to merely watching some other lucky bugger grab it.

LaCie 1Big SSD Pro. They cost well over a grand but is the type of system I'd like to build. Ultra high speed NVMe, tons of ports, internal fan, SD card slot blah blah.

https://www.lacie.com/gb/en/products/bi ... k-ssd-pro/



Then watching the last few minutes, eBay goes tits up but the LaCie object of desire is still there and sitting at a very respectable price.

I nabbed it for £200! Can't believe it tbh. The simple drive enclosure and chip I just bought (and don't have yet!) cost that much.

Shan't count my chickens until they come home to roost but that has to be one of my very best snipes ever.

[Mussels]

Expect an accident to happen to it soon meaning it gets withdrawn from sale.

[Slenver]

Amazing if you get it.

Mine is the spinny 8Tb variant of that range.

[Screwdriver]

Expect an accident to happen to it soon meaning it gets withdrawn from sale.

Yeah, be still my beating heart.

It has a couple of things going for it: the seller didn't know what it was, came in with some music gear I suspect. eBay went a bit Pete Tong (not just for me) just at the right moment.

There are loads of LaCie spinning disk versions, this is the only SSD Pro one I have ever seen on eBay...**


**in this country, under a grand

[Ant]

This is an interesting read, it looks like hard drive technology has moved on a bit since I've had to buy one. My systems still use SATA, I don't know what the drive in my newish HP laptop will be, SSD or even that NVMe?

[Screwdriver]

This is an interesting read, it looks like hard drive technology has moved on a bit since I've had to buy one. My systems still use SATA, I don't know what the drive in my newish HP laptop will be, SSD or even that NVMe?

What's the exact model/version?

[Ant]

This is an interesting read, it looks like hard drive technology has moved on a bit since I've had to buy one. My systems still use SATA, I don't know what the drive in my newish HP laptop will be, SSD or even that NVMe?

What's the exact model/version?

It's an HP Envy x360, Intel i5. It's incredibly thin, so probably is the newer drive type?