This is my favourite channel. Didn't have much $ and decided to buy a M2 Mac Mini. But I chose 16gb RAM instead of choosing 512GB SSD. I'll just use an external SSD for less $. Thanks for all those tests.
@@adredy Too be fair its crazy fast RAM that is also soldered with direct access to the every component in the SOC since its all built together. Memory upgrades cost the same from others like Dell and HP so tbh it doesn't matter
@@spencerrr9878 Dell and HP will accept a dirt-cheap SODIMM memory module, that costs just a *fraction* what Apple charges. 8gb from Apple: $200 USD 8gb from Amazon: $15 USD
Swapping to an external SSD does not use DMA. Samsung 970evo plus has one disadvantage in that scenario when more than 80% full the 990 Pro is the only drive that nearly does not go down in access time and transfer rate due to a changed timing of TLC and a better Controller. Having the thunderbolt drive as the main work drive but not the boot drive is fine. It takes the load and is easily replaceable or upgradable when used up. The only issue with those drives is they need good cooling, otherwise, they slow down when getting hot. So don't underestimate the contact with head transfer material to metal parts in the enclosure, they have to be well established to have a stable system. I use it as the main Finalcut Work folder, Download folder and VM image folder. Those folders have been linked to the normal System on the internal SSD. Works fine and is reliable.
A lot of people are only looking at the transfer speeds. The internal sad is designed for low latency with the controller on the M2. Thus it will always be faster for swap. The point is you CAN get away with the small and “slow” system drive, by using two drives. Leave the internal drive for swap, system and basic app files. Then use the external drive for all your video, builds and plugins. When doing builds, encodings of renderings always write to the external drive. That way the internal drive is dedicated to swap only at high memory load operations. That’s the magic formula :)
Great video. I did get my M2 with 512GB drive but it’s great to see that the 256GB drives don’t completely hamstring the M2. I think these machines need more RAM out of the base machine. I maxed mine out with 24GB and I added a TB4 TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD. I’m completely happy with my M2 Mac Mini.
I'm just wondering, how the drive performs when you run the entire OS from the drive. I'm interested in understanding how this would work. How does it perform when the system uses the main drive for cache?
You can always set up the external SSD to be mapped as your home/user directory + apps, and let the internal drive be just for the OS and swap - then just max out the RAM to reduce swap usage.
@@D-One You search on google how to do it :) - I don't think symlinks are necessary - just settings. Always backup your data first to a separate backup HD.
@@wavesequencer -.- It's just right-clicking on the User profile under "User & Groups" in system settings and selecting "Advanced Options". Thanks anyway.
@@D-One Cool - glad you found it - I don't have my Mac to hand and don't currently do it that way, but I would definitely move home folder off the internal HD if I got a Mac silicon based system.
Alex, I have seen a lot of iffy videos on how to do it, but you should make a video showing us what steps you took to clone the operating system onto the the Orico Thunderbolt drive, and then how you can make that your default disk drive so that we with the 8/256 M2's setups can use the bigger drive to get more done, on Ventura.... Thanks a lot, love your stuff!
SSD speed is such an overblown issue for developers. Most benchmarking done by TH-camrs are done on video editing for which yes it makes a big difference during file export, etc. But for developers, 256GB already gives excellent performance, if you have to choose, the memory upgrade will have a much bigger impact on your day-to-day life. But seriously, I’d be really surprised same developer could tell both SSDs apart without timing builds. It’s not like we are sitting around watching the prompt to complete when building 😅 Well I hope so 😂
But at the same time, any professional video editor, which is literally none of these reviewers or forum lurkers criticising the 256GB model, would always use an external as a scratch drive.
You can allocate cache drive on machines with multiple volumes so love to see you retest using internal storage for this & see what difference that makes.
Just ordered my first mac, the new mini. Did the upgrade to 16gb since it seems like the most reasonable upgrade path with external SSD options down the road. Will be interesting to see how I do on it since I'm so used to Windows.
Under any circumstances, DO NOT use macOS on external drive. You'll lose out on firmware updates for your computer (they only work when macOS is booted from internal). AND performance of Apple Silicon SSD controller is so insanely high that it'll still beat any external SSD by a large margin. Sure, it may not have the best bandwidth, but response times and random read performance is blowing everything else out of the water. So please just keep using internal storage for macOS and applications, and use external for a data that does not require extreme storage performance (like photo library, music library, etc.)
I’m pretty sure you can create a symlink/hardlink where the vm swap files are stored and set it to use the internal drive only. There might also be a way to change the dynamic pager config to use a specific directory (which you can set to the internal drive)
Thank you Alex, this video will help to begginers or pleople with a low budget, good video like always, keep doing it please, you help all developers with your videos.
I suspect that the reason the external SSD slowed was that it was not running in parallel. The 1TB in the Mac Mini M2 has 4X256GB NAND modules, meaning 4X the faster cache in each module. Whereas the 1TB external drive will face the same issues as the one NAND 256GB drive, the bandwidth will be up to 4X less. What Max Tech got wrong was that swap speed is based on random read and write, not sequential speeds. Few of us need more than 3.2Gbps, as random reads and writes top out at around 800Mbps. So it was the fact that 1TB has 4 NAND drives rather than the 1 in the 256GB hence slowdowns in swap happens quicker on the smaller SSD. So, if running from an external system with 8GB of RAM, you would need multiple SSDs running in parallel. The clear moral of the story as I commented many times on Max Tech videos, is that using 8GB and lots of swap is inefficient. Buy what RAM you need, so 16GB minimum for semi-pro work, but the more the merrier. RAM is so much faster than swap, that it is inconceivable that if you want best performance, that you would cheap out when you know that 8GB will mean high swap usage.
I'm confused though - whilst I agree a single 1TB non-parallel drive would be less efficient that a x4 internal parallel 1TB drive - this video shows that a non-parallel 1TB external drive was being massively outperformed in SWAP efficiency by the internal 256GB non-parallel drive. So in this case, the issue cant have anything to do with parallels, as Alex's memory pressure and SWAP usage was considerably better on the smaller, slower, still non-parallel drive. I'm confused as to what actually caused the SWAP slowdowns and memory pressure on the external drive?
@@beelzzebub I think problem lies in SLC cache of these SSDs. In reality, on Samsung 970 Evo it's SLC cache is only 6 GB - and this is where Alex saw drastical drop in performance. No, so called “intelligent Turbowrite“ isn't going to help. That and probably coupled with the enclosure - maybe overheating caused this too?
I just upgraded to the Mac Mini 4 with 16gigs of ram and 512 HD. After watching a few videos the ram is upgradeable and the job can be done in less than an hour, not that I plan on doing this as I got the same external as you have and put a 2 TB drive in it
I tried the external enclosure with a 2TB SSD as my system drive on my Mac Mini (i7 / 128GB). It turned out to be too unreliable, sometimes the speed would drop to < 100 MB/s, and sometimes the system would freeze. I ended up moving the 2TB to my gaming PC and get a Samsung T7. Yes it is only 800MB/s write / 900MB/s read, but it works as system drive with no issue at all. Maybe I was just unlucky with my enclosure unit, but to me it did not work as expected.
I’ve bought almost the same enclosure branded as Acasis and achieved the same speed with Samsung 980 pro 1tb and iMac 2020. I really impressed. I’m using it as a project storage and build drive.
@@AZisk agree. Also tested the same way with your favorite time command ))) And temperature is also good. I’ve applied the thickest thermal pad from the kit and regular temperature is in range 37-43 celsius. The highest one is 56 degrees after 15 min benchmark test.
great video. very well thought and great advice. I think this topic deserves a 2nd video. Maybe there could be potential solutions for the swap slowdown....
For example, my MacBook Air M1 with 1 TB of SSD reaches 3600 MB/s write, 2797 MB/s read. Funny story is that SSD are so fast these days that it really doesn't matter. Good video!
Very helpful video. Seems like the 200 IQ move would be to just max out the RAM with the smallest SSD and then boot from a decent M.2 in a Thunderbolt enclosure. Both Apple's RAM and SSD prices are insane, but at least we can get around one of them...
Great video! Observation: I copied your Mac Mini setup to the letter including using a Samsung NVMe in the Orico enclosure as my boot drive on the Mini 256/16. To my surprise, the Orico enclosure gets very hot during even minimum use. Since it is my boot drive the heat makes me very nervous. Is this something you’ve run into? How much should I worry? Regards
If you like the OWC TB-4 Dock, you should check out the Mini Stack STX. 3 TB Ports, 2 USB A ports, HDMI, 1GbE networking, 3.5mm audio. NVME M.2 blade for speed and a 3.5" HDD for capacity. (disclaimer, I work for OWC)
Thank you for this video. I really like your work and how you explain things. If I am correct in my understanding, I connect an external NVMe SSD (with Enclosure) to the MAC, reboot to recovery mode and install macOS Ventura to that SSD drive. From then on I continue to boot from the external SSD with the result that I have significantly increased Read/Write Drive Speeds. This is very interesting considering the price Apple charges to upgrade internal storage is so outrageous. I have seen others reviewers suggest the same Orico Enclosure so that's the one for me.
My M2 Mini (16/512) will be delivered next week. I want to set it up to get the most out of it as is possible. Aside from mundane Word & Excel work I do a fair bit of image editing. Nothing that should be too taxing for this machine. Is the consensus set up to leave the OS on the internal SSD and put the home directory and applications on a TB4 NVMe drive? I’m a little concerned about apps and later app updates losing track of what’s where?
The video clarifies all questions regarding external NVMe! I had the idea to install MacOS on an external NVMe, which works without any problems. But that doesn't really seem to have much effect on performance, could even be problematic with swap storage, right?
Note you showed to cache potential right in the first external drive test, copy was from ram and not from internal hd (otherwise it would have been at internal [read] speed despite the faster external [write] speed)
Would the issue with the external swap be because of random access speed times? There is so much focus on sequential speed of the one NAND drives. How does random access speed for small files compare between the 256 gig SSD and the larger multi NAND module drives compare?
I would not think too much about swap being used, i would care much more about AVOIDING SWAP at all cost. As i got my 16" M1 Pro base model i was also scared a bit im running out of the 16GB shared RAM, and in fact i can trigger it (editing a video in FCP while enhancing a 4k video with Topaz Video Enhance AI and many browser tabs opened) I used like 7-10GB swap on top of the used 16GB Ram and the machine also slowed down noticable (Swap on internal SSD) Its funny tho... if the Swap is just used for non processing stuff the machine even handles well with 5GB swap used, if more than 16GB Ram are "needed" for the processing of whatever, the machine still slows down, depending only on how much Swap is used and how much acess is needed on the swap. Compared to a TB4 SSD enclosure for swap with a 1TB SSD i barely noticed a difference in performance loss when the task and Ram/Swap usage was similar, but 2000MB/s are still damn fast. I would just go for a 16GB, better 24 or 32GB RAM upgrade and enjoy a long lasting (in Ram size and its performance) machine. If i would have to buy another M1 Pro MacBook today, i would probably buy at least a 1TB SSD/32GB Ram version instead of the base model. 16GB are nowadays just the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM amount of Ram a machine should have, and considering apple targets the MacBook Pros to "professionals".... 24, better 32GB should have been already minimum standard.
@@paulf3353 Its ok if its used, but it depends on the workload and if data in the swap file are also accessed and used for processing. I have actually also 3GB swap used, despite the ram is only filled 7GB out of 16, but thats a lot of stationary, not yet used/needed data so the performance isnt affected and the 3,x GB swap used doesnt change much in use. So i meant basically that your Ram is better enough for the workload you are throwing at the machine, not the 30 browser tabs
I’m guessing the components on the board are a little more integrated, which is why there’s less penalty using swap with the internal ssd. Swap using the external drive probably involves a less well integrated/optimized external component, which may explain the why swap is less efficient with the external.
In rare cases it does help to have even faster SSD speeds. I know it is a premium to pay, but the larger drives in the newer Mac models exceed 6,000 MB/s. When working with huge sqlite files (lots of ram and SSD swapping?) it can be noticed.
Remember when people thought Unified Memory was some magical unicorn juice that eliminated the need for more RAM capacity and swap? I 'Member. I knew that was bunk and just pointed to the lower quality reviewers. As a data scientist if you need to merge millions of rows of data they need to be somewhere fast, unified memory just means no swapping between GPU and CPU pools but the capacity is the capacity, any fallover goes to swap which is still orders of magnitude slower (it's not the peak transfer speed, it's the access time and the small kb read/writes)
I got Orico one as well that comes with builtin fan . I does up to 3600 ~ 3800 MB with WD SN580 drive . I saw on many manufacturer's guide , they recommend WD for M series apple silicon , weird but it performs better somehow
I still use my MacBook Pro 13” Mid 2010 4 GB RAM, It does what I need and I go heavy on the RAM when only using it. Never had a crash always giving me what I want. Mac OS is all about quality and longevity.. Cant wait to customize my Mac Mini Soon
Hi Alex, this is important. You used in this test a 970 EVO model which has only a small amount of MLC memory for the buffer. For some transfer speeds all is ok but once the buffer is full the drive becomes the poor TLC NAND which all knows what speeds can produce. Try with 970 pro or 960 pro. The 980 pro and 990 pro are no better because they abandoned the NAND architecture for cheep manufacture. Redo the tests and you will be impressed. Waiting for feedback
I believe the culprit is not the Thunderbolt interface, but the flash drive. The 970 Evo Plus has been silently crippled by Samsung to use QLC NAND instead of TLC NAND. Once the superfast SLC cache is filled/overwhelmed (easily done by swap) then the drive will run much more slowly. See "Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs" dated 8/27/2021 on Ars Technica. Using a higher end/better quality drive would probably have avoided your performance issues when under heavy memory pressure. Just remember that there are also DRAM and DRAMless M2 drives too, and although DRAM SSDs are much faster one must also consider what happens in a power failure since DRAM information is wiped once power is cut, so finding a DRAM SSD should also have capacitors to keep them powered so information on the DRAM can be written to the SSD, which is probably important for an OS/data drive. I think Apple has given a great deal for the base machine, but 8/256GB is probably underspecced for anyone doing more than basic browsing or office type tasks.
@@AZisk now i gotta think too hard for either another mini or go for the studio 🤔. I’m a retired hardware/software engineer so i think I answered my dilemma… studio. Only concern i have is all the talk about no more updates and support for the studio. But updating the studio to an m2 chip really going to make huge leap for the studio? Im a drummer so using chained electronic drum modules via midi to DAWs. And always compiling for addons and my 3d printer. Studio should last for a number of years. I have 2 old minis retired. 4k retina imac, older imac and MacBook air still using but its time to upgrade 👍
@@AZisk oh god not another hobby. Learning 3d modeling for 3d printing.. thats enough for now lol But will keep thinking on configurations for mini m2. 16gig ram, external ssd maybe thats the ticket 🤔 thankx for inputs
For Students, Journalists, Authors - Get the base Mac Mini M2 with a minimum of 16GB unified memory. For song writers, musicians and audio engineers, the M2 Mac Mini with a minimum of 24GB unified memory and at least 1TB SSD is all you need to run all the plugins and vast scores of music you have. For the content creator, architect, researchers or engineers using 3D modeling software, programmers, ...the Mac Studio is built especially for you.
Thank you for this. I think I’m going M2 MAC MINI 24GB RAM and 256SSD. More Ram simply because I want to run and experiment with virtualization. Rather go overkill with RAM with an option to use external SSD when I need it in the future.
So my takeaway from this as a retail non-power user is get the base model with an external 1Tb NVME at 10% the cost of the apple upgrade, to boot from and I’m good. Thanks for your excellent video. I’ve been looking for exactly this. 👍
I think this was unclear in the video....1TB drive ($400) added to base machine ($600) is $1000. Buying external 40gbps enclosure and 1TB NVME would be about $200 so this is 50% of the cost of the Apple upgrade. 2TB NVMe would be $150-$200 that that would be a much bigger saving over the $800 Apple charges for 2TB.
Would it be possible to use the internal disk for swap and run the os from external? I would imagine lower latency if that could improve its performance maybe?
I think I read somewhere that in the mac mini, Apple limits the speed of external ssds on purpose, so using more expensive ssds doesn't make sense. Does anyone know anything about it?
Nice technical video. I was looking to get the M2 Pro, but maybe the M2 is enough. Nice trick with the OS on an external. I do basic, video, podcasting etc. Not a programmer. Currently my desktop is an i7 Macbook Pro 2017 16RAM & 1T SSD, 16T HDD external. The savings with the M2 I could get more RAM and the needed bluetooth keyboard & track pad.
Problem is not external drive itself that much. Problem in Alex case was huge, abnormal swap which depleted SLC cache on the 970 Evo. With 16 GB of RAM, 980 Pro (which doesn’t drop performance as 970 Evo when cache is full) you shouldn’t have any problems at all.
I have 2 of the OWC 4M2 Express enclosures and I love them. I also love my 2 Acasis enclosures. The latter get 2800 r/w with Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB and Samsung 980 PRO 2 TB. The former get 2500 r/w with Samsung 980 PRO 2 TB X 4 and 1900 read and 2300 write with Crucial P3 Plus 4 TB X 4. I should have gotten the less expensive SSDs like you did given the Thunderbolt 4 limitation of 2800! I am hooked on SSDs! My Mac Studio Ultra with 1 TB SSD gets 5700 r/w
Excellent research video, and I really liked your solution, as well as appropriate use cases at the end. How well or not well would video editing do on the external drive? Just curious if you've tried that yet.
Me watching this on a desktop PC based on sata 3 600mb/s SSD xD Those base speeds are still insane, like it's supposed to be the cheapest Mac computer, so not the "fastest", but sure I get that :) Cool upgrade, nice video :)
Ok super interesting - but i'm sat here thinking "Buy why?" - if the external SSD is so much better than the internal, and it's using thunderbolt 4, WHY would it begin to slow down so much when it comes to swap? I know it's external, but it's a faster drive, so why any slow down? Perhaps the answer is that, regardless of drive speed, moving things in and out of swap is inherently less efficient on an external drive? Perhaps it's because the external drive is a single non-parallel drive - but the 256GB internal is ALSO a single non-parallel drive, and swap was so much faster in your video (unless I misunderstood?). I'm not sure. If that's the case, then maybe there's an argument for upgrading the RAM (to reduce your potential need for swap entirely) then using your OS on a large external drive for a cost saving? The findings were cool - I just wanted a little more explanation :D
Hi Alex, Is it possible to use the external SSD as boot; and use the internal SSD for SWAP!? Can you see the internal SSD while booted from external SSD?
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How about using internal disk just as swap disk and additional stuff that you'd like to do with, and using external TB4 drive for OS and everything else? I believe the overall results would be even better than using only internal disk for everything?
I don't even do coding but I still come here to pick up bits and bobs of tips for other usages. I for example have a mactudio with three, 2tb Thunderbolt enclosures in a RAID 0 because, well, I can! But mostly because as a video person I am regularly copying files and my internal is only 512 so I thought this way I get an extra 6tb of storage running at just over 5000 and do my editing, caching,assets etc on the external but have the progg and things like titles and transitions on the internal that way I don't use the internal much, will hopefully extend its life cycle and have the 6tb of storage for £750 not the mad amount that apple charge and of course I can expand it to 12Tb or just swap out the drives. But look at that, Apple have me thinking that £750 is a good deal when I have 2, 4tb WD duo RAIDs for storage and backup that only cost me £65 each refurbished from WD. THey are Red drives so pretty slow, but in my head, £750 is a great deal, which it might be by comparison!! Anyway, love your content, enjoy your delivery. Top work.
You said something at the end about loading software on the external drive. Did I understand that correctly? Sorry, I am new to this. Just ordered a Mac Mini M2 after my iMac died. I am used to working with 3tb internal drive so I am a little nervous with just 256gb internal. Thank you
I use a external thunderbolt 4 drive with a 1TB crucial SSD (1900MB/s read/write) as swap and as proxy for my MacBook Pro 16" base model with 512GB internal storage, I never had issues with the swap so far but i also barely use it, at maximum 2 to 4 GB are used in the swap since the 16GB Ram are mostly enough. For demanding stuff tho, i close unnecessary apps like the browser for example especially when its full with tons of tabs.
So if I install macOS and apps on the external drive and boot from it, could I do video editing or make music? Since everything is soldered on new macs, this might prolong mac's lifespan possibly?
I have a question. Did I make the right choice? I ordered the new Mac mini with 32 Gb ram but left the internal drive as base 256 Gb. My logic is I can upsize storage externally, but can never do anything about the on chip memory size. Is 256 going to big big enough to future proof the macOS versions? At what point does the OS take up enough of that 256 to become a problem?
The latest macOS only requires 25GB of free space to install, so there's no reason to be afraid that 256GB will be too small for future versions anytime soon (as in within the next decade). There might be reasons why future versions require significantly more disk space to work well post-install, but if 256GB ever becomes an issue, it's very likely that you'll be able to offload some of that extra stuff to an external drive -- e.g. a large local data cache for Apple Intelligence. At worst, you would sacrifice some performance, but even then, in most cases, you'd be fine. I'm getting the 256GB m4 mini and planning on buying a 1TB external Gen 4 SSD for everything but macOS itself. Should be fine for the foreseeable future.
See all those Chrome tasks! Chrome is the way we stay warm this winter in our office (We all use Dell i7 laptops!). Note: you can combat the fan noise with $500 noise cancellation headphones LOL! ROI
If you run your MacOS from your external drive, is the internal ssd used at all? I imagine is external drive is now the system drive, memory swap will also happen there instead of the internal ssd.
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If you could swap to the internal while the operating system is on the external, we would have the best of both worlds. This is a no brainer in Linux, maybe with some tinkering Mac OS allows it.
this is how i run my m1 mini 16 ram with 256 ssd. i added a acasis tb4 enclosure with a nvme ssd running system off it for 2 years now. i only boot from onboard drive to update it.
Sorry I didn’t get one thing. If I would use the external drive as a backup drive, not the system one, and manage all repos in there how would npm installs and frameworks start go? I am a heavy Gatsby user that is great but it sucks at performance on build/dev boot..
Great video, just techy enough to understand for a non-developer. I’m thinking about getting the Mac Mini base model and only upgrading the RAM to 16gb. $200 to upgrade the storage from 256 to 512 is absolute highway robbery (friggin greedy Apple😠). I do mostly video editing, audio, and color using Premiere Pro, Resolve, Pro Tools, and sometimes After Effects and Photoshop. Would doing the OS to the SSD swap be ok for someone like me? The slowdown he encountered seemed to be from from heavy web-development type stuff, which I don’t think I would encounter doing what I do. Does this seem right?
Hi I was thinking about buying an external SSD like the want you're showing here, My Mac mini M1 have 16GB of Ram and 512GB of Internal Disk (which is almost full) I do some video editing not that super intensive 4k and audio stuff in audition or premiere, do you think It will work for me because probably the swap won't affect me since I have 16 of Ram?
at 2:30 - 40 gigaBIT speeds. 40 gigabytes is 320 gigabits per second, which is not possible over thunderbolt. Transfer rates are always measured in gigabits per second. So if you have a 100 megabit internet connection, you are only getting 12.5 megabytes per second, not 100 megabytes per second. People always think their internet or transfer rate are blazing fast, when in reality, you need to divide megabits by 8 to get megabytes, which is the metric most people are familiar with. There are 8 bits in one byte.
Yes I agree: most benefit you'll get from updating the RAM. But why are all TH-camrs buying the base-base 8&256. Don't we all agree that in 2023 the minimum amount of RAM is 16? My suggestion for the mini Mac (I like that name more than the Mac Mini. Like mini me): M2 16&512 good minimum. M2 pro 32&1024 good minimum higher level. For more: wait for the M2 Studio.
Does the base model Mac Mini have dual channel Ram? Single channel ddr5 6400 supports 51.2 GB/s unless your using multiple chips. To get the advertised memory bandwidth of 100 GB/s you need multiple DDR5 channels.
Can you set up a swap file on the external drive? Also, the Seagate Ironwolf 525 nmve ssd can support up to 70% of it's entire contents to be rewritten everyday for 5yr, and still be within warranty
What if the internal -non replaceable- drive dies ? Can you still boot with the external and give the mac a new life? (instead of paying crazy money to apple for repairs) -And if yes, but you don't have setup a bootable drive with the OS yet, can you just create it on another mac ?
@@ZhuJo99I know this is old by now but I *had* to respond. Up until the Apple Silicon era the answer was “Yes!” But with Apple Silicon machines the answer is “No!” To even be able to boot the machine (e.g., to an external bootable volume), the internal drive must be accessible and in working order. There is some pre-boot code on there that can only be loaded from the internal (security feature).
Very nice and interesting video. Good job Alex! Planning to buy my first apple device this year, and it would be a Mac mini m2 (16gb/256gb). My use case is mainly everyday tasks, doing school projects (studying business IT) and in my free time I started to learn pentest, so I have to use Linux. @Alex: Would it be fine to use the above mentioned Mac mini with Linux in parallels VM? Right now I have a windows machine and I either use windows or VM, so this would be the same thing with Mac.
It’s interesting why external drive used 10 gb of swap in the same scenario. My M1 512gb air also dies when it reaches 10 gb of swap (I have 8gb air). Maybe there were some unexpected background processes when testing on the external drive, I don’t know. By the way, interesting topic. Thanks for the video!
I expect it is software encoded, so that the process will use more swap in a 1TB drive than in a 256GB drive as Apple knows that 1TB can handle more swap than 256GB before it slows. However, due to the 1Tb internal drives having 4 NAND chips in parallel they can each take some of that swap in their faster MLC memory. I suspect the 1TB external SSD is a single stick so does not have 4X the bandwidth of the internal drives for caching data before it offloads to the much slower storage partition.
@@andyH_England and as far as I know, it is not possible to limit swap in macOS. But if you are right then external drive has to be limited to 256gb and then (theoretically) it should work better than internal ssd because of the speed. Sadly I do not have external drive to test this theory :(
Hey, how did you get the Mac mini to boot using the external drive? Did you use the USB A port? I haven’t been able to boot from the external drive for booting from my M1 iMac, when it used to work fine earlier on my old Intel iMac. I have tried re-installing the macOS version for Big Sur and Monterey when they came out, but none worked :/
Hey Alex ...how about the issue with installing software and the drive not giving you the option to "ALLOW" the extension to be installed?..like Universal Audio Apollo Software on macOS Ventura any suggestions?
Hi Alex, will WD_Black™ SN850X 1tb work properly with M2 Pro Mac Mini ? or better to get samsung nvme for enclosure use? also did you get any problem while transferring file from internal to external vise versa , any connection problem, Thank you
Parallels VMs taking up a huge amount of space on that 256 GB drive.. the regular new Mac user doesn't have to worry about running out of space* if they keep to macOS and don't install Parallels. *I can see the space being used for photos and other files.. But not always a niche thing like Parallels
That's literally the best video ever showing real impact of the disk speed from the developers perspective, thx a lot!
This is my favourite channel. Didn't have much $ and decided to buy a M2 Mac Mini. But I chose 16gb RAM instead of choosing 512GB SSD. I'll just use an external SSD for less $. Thanks for all those tests.
Buy what you can't personally upgrade !
stupid prices even for 8gb ram :/ crazy company
@@adredy Too be fair its crazy fast RAM that is also soldered with direct access to the every component in the SOC since its all built together. Memory upgrades cost the same from others like Dell and HP so tbh it doesn't matter
@@spencerrr9878 Yeah, it costs the same as Dell and HP because those companies are copying Apple's insane ripoff prices.
@@spencerrr9878 Dell and HP will accept a dirt-cheap SODIMM memory module, that costs just a *fraction* what Apple charges.
8gb from Apple: $200 USD
8gb from Amazon: $15 USD
This are the kinds of videos that I support.
Thanks Alex for doing the public a service.
All the best
Swapping to an external SSD does not use DMA. Samsung 970evo plus has one disadvantage in that scenario when more than 80% full the 990 Pro is the only drive that nearly does not go down in access time and transfer rate due to a changed timing of TLC and a better Controller. Having the thunderbolt drive as the main work drive but not the boot drive is fine. It takes the load and is easily replaceable or upgradable when used up. The only issue with those drives is they need good cooling, otherwise, they slow down when getting hot. So don't underestimate the contact with head transfer material to metal parts in the enclosure, they have to be well established to have a stable system. I use it as the main Finalcut Work folder, Download folder and VM image folder. Those folders have been linked to the normal System on the internal SSD. Works fine and is reliable.
A lot of people are only looking at the transfer speeds. The internal sad is designed for low latency with the controller on the M2. Thus it will always be faster for swap.
The point is you CAN get away with the small and “slow” system drive, by using two drives. Leave the internal drive for swap, system and basic app files. Then use the external drive for all your video, builds and plugins. When doing builds, encodings of renderings always write to the external drive. That way the internal drive is dedicated to swap only at high memory load operations. That’s the magic formula :)
Great video. I did get my M2 with 512GB drive but it’s great to see that the 256GB drives don’t completely hamstring the M2. I think these machines need more RAM out of the base machine. I maxed mine out with 24GB and I added a TB4 TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD. I’m completely happy with my M2 Mac Mini.
I'm just wondering, how the drive performs when you run the entire OS from the drive. I'm interested in understanding how this would work. How does it perform when the system uses the main drive for cache?
this is gold. you answered the big question with some actual real life testing. thanks for the work man!
You can always set up the external SSD to be mapped as your home/user directory + apps, and let the internal drive be just for the OS and swap - then just max out the RAM to reduce swap usage.
How do you do that? Symlink?
@@D-One You search on google how to do it :) - I don't think symlinks are necessary - just settings. Always backup your data first to a separate backup HD.
@@wavesequencer -.- It's just right-clicking on the User profile under "User & Groups" in system settings and selecting "Advanced Options". Thanks anyway.
@@D-One Cool - glad you found it - I don't have my Mac to hand and don't currently do it that way, but I would definitely move home folder off the internal HD if I got a Mac silicon based system.
Also... moving home, doesn't move apps.. you have to do that manually.
Alex, I have seen a lot of iffy videos on how to do it, but you should make a video showing us what steps you took to clone the operating system onto the the Orico Thunderbolt drive, and then how you can make that your default disk drive so that we with the 8/256 M2's setups can use the bigger drive to get more done, on Ventura.... Thanks a lot, love your stuff!
SSD speed is such an overblown issue for developers. Most benchmarking done by TH-camrs are done on video editing for which yes it makes a big difference during file export, etc. But for developers, 256GB already gives excellent performance, if you have to choose, the memory upgrade will have a much bigger impact on your day-to-day life. But seriously, I’d be really surprised same developer could tell both SSDs apart without timing builds. It’s not like we are sitting around watching the prompt to complete when building 😅 Well I hope so 😂
But at the same time, any professional video editor, which is literally none of these reviewers or forum lurkers criticising the 256GB model, would always use an external as a scratch drive.
You can allocate cache drive on machines with multiple volumes so love to see you retest using internal storage for this & see what difference that makes.
Oh wow I did not know you can set up a different drive for the cache, that would solve the issues with external SSDs
Just ordered my first mac, the new mini. Did the upgrade to 16gb since it seems like the most reasonable upgrade path with external SSD options down the road. Will be interesting to see how I do on it since I'm so used to Windows.
Under any circumstances, DO NOT use macOS on external drive.
You'll lose out on firmware updates for your computer (they only work when macOS is booted from internal).
AND performance of Apple Silicon SSD controller is so insanely high that it'll still beat any external SSD by a large margin. Sure, it may not have the best bandwidth, but response times and random read performance is blowing everything else out of the water.
So please just keep using internal storage for macOS and applications, and use external for a data that does not require extreme storage performance (like photo library, music library, etc.)
Couldn't you use the internal ssd only for OS and swap and install the programs and apps on the external ssd ?
Any proof links on that? Apple Silicon SSD controller is not any faster than any other top SSD controllers.
I’m pretty sure you can create a symlink/hardlink where the vm swap files are stored and set it to use the internal drive only. There might also be a way to change the dynamic pager config to use a specific directory (which you can set to the internal drive)
Thank you Alex, this video will help to begginers or pleople with a low budget, good video like always, keep doing it please, you help all developers with your videos.
I suspect that the reason the external SSD slowed was that it was not running in parallel. The 1TB in the Mac Mini M2 has 4X256GB NAND modules, meaning 4X the faster cache in each module. Whereas the 1TB external drive will face the same issues as the one NAND 256GB drive, the bandwidth will be up to 4X less. What Max Tech got wrong was that swap speed is based on random read and write, not sequential speeds. Few of us need more than 3.2Gbps, as random reads and writes top out at around 800Mbps. So it was the fact that 1TB has 4 NAND drives rather than the 1 in the 256GB hence slowdowns in swap happens quicker on the smaller SSD.
So, if running from an external system with 8GB of RAM, you would need multiple SSDs running in parallel. The clear moral of the story as I commented many times on Max Tech videos, is that using 8GB and lots of swap is inefficient. Buy what RAM you need, so 16GB minimum for semi-pro work, but the more the merrier. RAM is so much faster than swap, that it is inconceivable that if you want best performance, that you would cheap out when you know that 8GB will mean high swap usage.
thanks! great info!
I'm confused though - whilst I agree a single 1TB non-parallel drive would be less efficient that a x4 internal parallel 1TB drive - this video shows that a non-parallel 1TB external drive was being massively outperformed in SWAP efficiency by the internal 256GB non-parallel drive. So in this case, the issue cant have anything to do with parallels, as Alex's memory pressure and SWAP usage was considerably better on the smaller, slower, still non-parallel drive. I'm confused as to what actually caused the SWAP slowdowns and memory pressure on the external drive?
@@beelzzebub I think problem lies in SLC cache of these SSDs. In reality, on Samsung 970 Evo it's SLC cache is only 6 GB - and this is where Alex saw drastical drop in performance. No, so called “intelligent Turbowrite“ isn't going to help.
That and probably coupled with the enclosure - maybe overheating caused this too?
Hey Alex, it would be interesting to see how running a windows VM off the external drive performs on your base M2? Any chance of a video testing this?
I just upgraded to the Mac Mini 4 with 16gigs of ram and 512 HD. After watching a few videos the ram is upgradeable and the job can be done in less than an hour, not that I plan on doing this as I got the same external as you have and put a 2 TB drive in it
I tried the external enclosure with a 2TB SSD as my system drive on my Mac Mini (i7 / 128GB). It turned out to be too unreliable, sometimes the speed would drop to < 100 MB/s, and sometimes the system would freeze.
I ended up moving the 2TB to my gaming PC and get a Samsung T7. Yes it is only 800MB/s write / 900MB/s read, but it works as system drive with no issue at all. Maybe I was just unlucky with my enclosure unit, but to me it did not work as expected.
I’ve bought almost the same enclosure branded as Acasis and achieved the same speed with Samsung 980 pro 1tb and iMac 2020. I really impressed. I’m using it as a project storage and build drive.
im pretty impressed with these speeds. i moved 180GB in a minute or so.
@@AZisk agree. Also tested the same way with your favorite time command ))) And temperature is also good. I’ve applied the thickest thermal pad from the kit and regular temperature is in range 37-43 celsius. The highest one is 56 degrees after 15 min benchmark test.
Who doesn't love this guy? I had one of my m.2's burn out from using an enclosure. I was using . MyDigitalSSD M2X Portable USB 3.1 Gen 2.
great video. very well thought and great advice. I think this topic deserves a 2nd video. Maybe there could be potential solutions for the swap slowdown....
For example, my MacBook Air M1 with 1 TB of SSD reaches 3600 MB/s write, 2797 MB/s read. Funny story is that SSD are so fast these days that it really doesn't matter. Good video!
Very helpful video. Seems like the 200 IQ move would be to just max out the RAM with the smallest SSD and then boot from a decent M.2 in a Thunderbolt enclosure. Both Apple's RAM and SSD prices are insane, but at least we can get around one of them...
Or, the 200 IQ guy would choose a super-fast Windows machine instead. 90% of the world prefers Windows.
Great video!
Observation: I copied your Mac Mini setup to the letter including using a Samsung NVMe in the Orico enclosure as my boot drive on the Mini 256/16. To my surprise, the Orico enclosure gets very hot during even minimum use. Since it is my boot drive the heat makes me very nervous. Is this something you’ve run into? How much should I worry?
Regards
If you like the OWC TB-4 Dock, you should check out the Mini Stack STX. 3 TB Ports, 2 USB A ports, HDMI, 1GbE networking, 3.5mm audio. NVME M.2 blade for speed and a 3.5" HDD for capacity. (disclaimer, I work for OWC)
Are you using a proper thunderbolt 4 cable? The one apple has vs some other brand that may not be full speed?
Thank you for this video. I really like your work and how you explain things. If I am correct in my understanding, I connect an external NVMe SSD (with Enclosure) to the MAC, reboot to recovery mode and install macOS Ventura to that SSD drive. From then on I continue to boot from the external SSD with the result that I have significantly increased Read/Write Drive Speeds. This is very interesting considering the price Apple charges to upgrade internal storage is so outrageous. I have seen others reviewers suggest the same Orico Enclosure so that's the one for me.
Don't overlook the second half of the video where Alex shows the negative impact on swap with macOS installed on external drive.
My M2 Mini (16/512) will be delivered next week. I want to set it up to get the most out of it as is possible. Aside from mundane Word & Excel work I do a fair bit of image editing. Nothing that should be too taxing for this machine. Is the consensus set up to leave the OS on the internal SSD and put the home directory and applications on a TB4 NVMe drive? I’m a little concerned about apps and later app updates losing track of what’s where?
The video clarifies all questions regarding external NVMe! I had the idea to install MacOS on an external NVMe, which works without any problems. But that doesn't really seem to have much effect on performance, could even be problematic with swap storage, right?
Really appreciated the wrost case scenario mention there.
When they solder everything down, I think it's over.
I think one of the few videos that actually hep , and not only critizice the slow ssd
Note you showed to cache potential right in the first external drive test, copy was from ram and not from internal hd (otherwise it would have been at internal [read] speed despite the faster external [write] speed)
Great video Alex. Can I use that drive to boot on the another mac?
Would the issue with the external swap be because of random access speed times? There is so much focus on sequential speed of the one NAND drives. How does random access speed for small files compare between the 256 gig SSD and the larger multi NAND module drives compare?
I would not think too much about swap being used, i would care much more about AVOIDING SWAP at all cost.
As i got my 16" M1 Pro base model i was also scared a bit im running out of the 16GB shared RAM, and in fact i can trigger it (editing a video in FCP while enhancing a 4k video with Topaz Video Enhance AI and many browser tabs opened) I used like 7-10GB swap on top of the used 16GB Ram and the machine also slowed down noticable (Swap on internal SSD)
Its funny tho... if the Swap is just used for non processing stuff the machine even handles well with 5GB swap used, if more than 16GB Ram are "needed" for the processing of whatever, the machine still slows down, depending only on how much Swap is used and how much acess is needed on the swap.
Compared to a TB4 SSD enclosure for swap with a 1TB SSD i barely noticed a difference in performance loss when the task and Ram/Swap usage was similar, but 2000MB/s are still damn fast.
I would just go for a 16GB, better 24 or 32GB RAM upgrade and enjoy a long lasting (in Ram size and its performance) machine. If i would have to buy another M1 Pro MacBook today, i would probably buy at least a 1TB SSD/32GB Ram version instead of the base model. 16GB are nowadays just the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM amount of Ram a machine should have, and considering apple targets the MacBook Pros to "professionals".... 24, better 32GB should have been already minimum standard.
@@harrison00xXx You Can't really avoid swap in MACos, even if you have hundreds gigs of RAM MACos still using it.
@@paulf3353 Its ok if its used, but it depends on the workload and if data in the swap file are also accessed and used for processing.
I have actually also 3GB swap used, despite the ram is only filled 7GB out of 16, but thats a lot of stationary, not yet used/needed data so the performance isnt affected and the 3,x GB swap used doesnt change much in use.
So i meant basically that your Ram is better enough for the workload you are throwing at the machine, not the 30 browser tabs
I’m guessing the components on the board are a little more integrated, which is why there’s less penalty using swap with the internal ssd. Swap using the external drive probably involves a less well integrated/optimized external component, which may explain the why swap is less efficient with the external.
In rare cases it does help to have even faster SSD speeds. I know it is a premium to pay, but the larger drives in the newer Mac models exceed 6,000 MB/s. When working with huge sqlite files (lots of ram and SSD swapping?) it can be noticed.
Remember when people thought Unified Memory was some magical unicorn juice that eliminated the need for more RAM capacity and swap? I 'Member.
I knew that was bunk and just pointed to the lower quality reviewers. As a data scientist if you need to merge millions of rows of data they need to be somewhere fast, unified memory just means no swapping between GPU and CPU pools but the capacity is the capacity, any fallover goes to swap which is still orders of magnitude slower (it's not the peak transfer speed, it's the access time and the small kb read/writes)
I got Orico one as well that comes with builtin fan . I does up to 3600 ~ 3800 MB with WD SN580 drive . I saw on many manufacturer's guide , they recommend WD for M series apple silicon , weird but it performs better somehow
I still use my MacBook Pro 13” Mid 2010 4 GB RAM,
It does what I need and I go heavy on the RAM when only using it.
Never had a crash always giving me what I want.
Mac OS is all about quality and longevity..
Cant wait to customize my Mac Mini Soon
I have been meaning to try this, thank you so much for sharing!
of course:)
Hi Alex, this is important. You used in this test a 970 EVO model which has only a small amount of MLC memory for the buffer. For some transfer speeds all is ok but once the buffer is full the drive becomes the poor TLC NAND which all knows what speeds can produce. Try with 970 pro or 960 pro. The 980 pro and 990 pro are no better because they abandoned the NAND architecture for cheep manufacture. Redo the tests and you will be impressed. Waiting for feedback
This is true?
I’m about to upgrade from a 2020 M1 mini and was deliberating on the options. Your video has help me tremendously👍👍
Great video. Wow! Thank you. You’re the first TH-camr I’ve seen who tested this.
No problem!
I believe the culprit is not the Thunderbolt interface, but the flash drive. The 970 Evo Plus has been silently crippled by Samsung to use QLC NAND instead of TLC NAND. Once the superfast SLC cache is filled/overwhelmed (easily done by swap) then the drive will run much more slowly. See "Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs" dated 8/27/2021 on Ars Technica.
Using a higher end/better quality drive would probably have avoided your performance issues when under heavy memory pressure. Just remember that there are also DRAM and DRAMless M2 drives too, and although DRAM SSDs are much faster one must also consider what happens in a power failure since DRAM information is wiped once power is cut, so finding a DRAM SSD should also have capacitors to keep them powered so information on the DRAM can be written to the SSD, which is probably important for an OS/data drive.
I think Apple has given a great deal for the base machine, but 8/256GB is probably underspecced for anyone doing more than basic browsing or office type tasks.
WOW great testing. And nice to see a very savvy user using the terminal.. luv it. 👏👏👌👍
Glad you liked it
@@AZisk now i gotta think too hard for either another mini or go for the studio 🤔. I’m a retired hardware/software engineer so i think I answered my dilemma… studio. Only concern i have is all the talk about no more updates and support for the studio. But updating the studio to an m2 chip really going to make huge leap for the studio? Im a drummer so using chained electronic drum modules via midi to DAWs. And always compiling for addons and my 3d printer. Studio should last for a number of years. I have 2 old minis retired. 4k retina imac, older imac and MacBook air still using but its time to upgrade 👍
@@rondeangelis7384 studio sounds like a bit overkill for what you’re doing, but it would last you longer, esp if you develop a video editing hobby :)
@@AZisk oh god not another hobby. Learning 3d modeling for 3d printing.. thats enough for now lol
But will keep thinking on configurations for mini m2. 16gig ram, external ssd maybe thats the ticket 🤔 thankx for inputs
Lmao, that slow is everyday situation when mcCafe anti virus runs and you can’t stop it cauz your company is paying you to work inefficiently
Spellcheck
For Students, Journalists, Authors - Get the base Mac Mini M2 with a minimum of 16GB unified memory. For song writers, musicians and audio engineers, the M2 Mac Mini with a minimum of 24GB unified memory and at least 1TB SSD is all you need to run all the plugins and vast scores of music you have. For the content creator, architect, researchers or engineers using 3D modeling software, programmers, ...the Mac Studio is built especially for you.
Can we use external drive as boot and internal as swap, i think that will produce the best results
Thank you for this. I think I’m going M2 MAC MINI 24GB RAM and 256SSD. More Ram simply because I want to run and experiment with virtualization. Rather go overkill with RAM with an option to use external SSD when I need it in the future.
Every computer I've ever purchased I take the memory I think I'll need, and double it. Eventually totally worth it!
good formula!
So my takeaway from this as a retail non-power user is get the base model with an external 1Tb NVME at 10% the cost of the apple upgrade, to boot from and I’m good. Thanks for your excellent video. I’ve been looking for exactly this. 👍
I think this was unclear in the video....1TB drive ($400) added to base machine ($600) is $1000. Buying external 40gbps enclosure and 1TB NVME would be about $200 so this is 50% of the cost of the Apple upgrade. 2TB NVMe would be $150-$200 that that would be a much bigger saving over the $800 Apple charges for 2TB.
Would it be possible to use the internal disk for swap and run the os from external? I would imagine lower latency if that could improve its performance maybe?
I think I read somewhere that in the mac mini, Apple limits the speed of external ssds on purpose, so using more expensive ssds doesn't make sense. Does anyone know anything about it?
Nice technical video. I was looking to get the M2 Pro, but maybe the M2 is enough. Nice trick with the OS on an external. I do basic, video, podcasting etc. Not a programmer. Currently my desktop is an i7 Macbook Pro 2017 16RAM & 1T SSD, 16T HDD external. The savings with the M2 I could get more RAM and the needed bluetooth keyboard & track pad.
Problem is not external drive itself that much. Problem in Alex case was huge, abnormal swap which depleted SLC cache on the 970 Evo.
With 16 GB of RAM, 980 Pro (which doesn’t drop performance as 970 Evo when cache is full) you shouldn’t have any problems at all.
I could only afford the base model - and it’s been great for me. Really good video - thanks!
I have 2 of the OWC 4M2 Express enclosures and I love them. I also love my 2 Acasis enclosures. The latter get 2800 r/w with Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB and Samsung 980 PRO 2 TB. The former get 2500 r/w with Samsung 980 PRO 2 TB X 4 and 1900 read and 2300 write with Crucial P3 Plus 4 TB X 4. I should have gotten the less expensive SSDs like you did given the Thunderbolt 4 limitation of 2800! I am hooked on SSDs! My Mac Studio Ultra with 1 TB SSD gets 5700 r/w
And thanks for a wonderfully didactic video!
Did you try moving the swap location back to the internal drive when running off of the external SSD?
Excellent research video, and I really liked your solution, as well as appropriate use cases at the end. How well or not well would video editing do on the external drive? Just curious if you've tried that yet.
Me watching this on a desktop PC based on sata 3 600mb/s SSD xD Those base speeds are still insane, like it's supposed to be the cheapest Mac computer, so not the "fastest", but sure I get that :) Cool upgrade, nice video :)
Ok super interesting - but i'm sat here thinking "Buy why?" - if the external SSD is so much better than the internal, and it's using thunderbolt 4, WHY would it begin to slow down so much when it comes to swap? I know it's external, but it's a faster drive, so why any slow down?
Perhaps the answer is that, regardless of drive speed, moving things in and out of swap is inherently less efficient on an external drive? Perhaps it's because the external drive is a single non-parallel drive - but the 256GB internal is ALSO a single non-parallel drive, and swap was so much faster in your video (unless I misunderstood?). I'm not sure.
If that's the case, then maybe there's an argument for upgrading the RAM (to reduce your potential need for swap entirely) then using your OS on a large external drive for a cost saving? The findings were cool - I just wanted a little more explanation :D
Hi Alex, Is it possible to use the external SSD as boot; and use the internal SSD for SWAP!? Can you see the internal SSD while booted from external SSD?
How about using internal disk just as swap disk and additional stuff that you'd like to do with, and using external TB4 drive for OS and everything else? I believe the overall results would be even better than using only internal disk for everything?
Any particular reason you didn’t try with the OS on external and swap on internal? Or does macOS not let you select the swap location separately?
I don't even do coding but I still come here to pick up bits and bobs of tips for other usages. I for example have a mactudio with three, 2tb Thunderbolt enclosures in a RAID 0 because, well, I can! But mostly because as a video person I am regularly copying files and my internal is only 512 so I thought this way I get an extra 6tb of storage running at just over 5000 and do my editing, caching,assets etc on the external but have the progg and things like titles and transitions on the internal that way I don't use the internal much, will hopefully extend its life cycle and have the 6tb of storage for £750 not the mad amount that apple charge and of course I can expand it to 12Tb or just swap out the drives. But look at that, Apple have me thinking that £750 is a good deal when I have 2, 4tb WD duo RAIDs for storage and backup that only cost me £65 each refurbished from WD. THey are Red drives so pretty slow, but in my head, £750 is a great deal, which it might be by comparison!! Anyway, love your content, enjoy your delivery. Top work.
This video sounds like black magic for a common folk like me! Brilliant, thanks a lot!
You said something at the end about loading software on the external drive. Did I understand that correctly? Sorry, I am new to this. Just ordered a Mac Mini M2 after my iMac died. I am used to working with 3tb internal drive so I am a little nervous with just 256gb internal. Thank you
Perhaps the small 256 GB Drive can be used as a cache/swap/scratch drive? Always a good option for me.
I use a external thunderbolt 4 drive with a 1TB crucial SSD (1900MB/s read/write) as swap and as proxy for my MacBook Pro 16" base model with 512GB internal storage, I never had issues with the swap so far but i also barely use it, at maximum 2 to 4 GB are used in the swap since the 16GB Ram are mostly enough. For demanding stuff tho, i close unnecessary apps like the browser for example especially when its full with tons of tabs.
So if I install macOS and apps on the external drive and boot from it, could I do video editing or make music? Since everything is soldered on new macs, this might prolong mac's lifespan possibly?
I have a question. Did I make the right choice? I ordered the new Mac mini with 32 Gb ram but left the internal drive as base 256 Gb. My logic is I can upsize storage externally, but can never do anything about the on chip memory size.
Is 256 going to big big enough to future proof the macOS versions? At what point does the OS take up enough of that 256 to become a problem?
The latest macOS only requires 25GB of free space to install, so there's no reason to be afraid that 256GB will be too small for future versions anytime soon (as in within the next decade). There might be reasons why future versions require significantly more disk space to work well post-install, but if 256GB ever becomes an issue, it's very likely that you'll be able to offload some of that extra stuff to an external drive -- e.g. a large local data cache for Apple Intelligence. At worst, you would sacrifice some performance, but even then, in most cases, you'd be fine.
I'm getting the 256GB m4 mini and planning on buying a 1TB external Gen 4 SSD for everything but macOS itself. Should be fine for the foreseeable future.
@
Thanks for the reassurance!
See all those Chrome tasks! Chrome is the way we stay warm this winter in our office (We all use Dell i7 laptops!). Note: you can combat the fan noise with $500 noise cancellation headphones LOL! ROI
Excellent video 👍👌
Precise, well explained and to the point
Glad it was helpful!
Hi Alex, great video, what kind of card reader do you use or recommend. anything higher 100 mb/s ?
If you run your MacOS from your external drive, is the internal ssd used at all? I imagine is external drive is now the system drive, memory swap will also happen there instead of the internal ssd.
If you could swap to the internal while the operating system is on the external, we would have the best of both worlds. This is a no brainer in Linux, maybe with some tinkering Mac OS allows it.
Hey, Alex plug your magsafe in you macbook pro and try moving the top of you hand through the macbook. Do you fell any thingling sensetion?
this is how i run my m1 mini 16 ram with 256 ssd. i added a acasis tb4 enclosure with a nvme ssd running system off it for 2 years now. i only boot from onboard drive to update it.
Let it fly…YES: out of the window!
What would be the probable reason why the swapping is slow on the external SSD compared to the internal SSD?
By design. They want you to upgrade everything ordering at a huge cost.
Sorry I didn’t get one thing. If I would use the external drive as a backup drive, not the system one, and manage all repos in there how would npm installs and frameworks start go? I am a heavy Gatsby user that is great but it sucks at performance on build/dev boot..
Great video, just techy enough to understand for a non-developer. I’m thinking about getting the Mac Mini base model and only upgrading the RAM to 16gb. $200 to upgrade the storage from 256 to 512 is absolute highway robbery (friggin greedy Apple😠). I do mostly video editing, audio, and color using Premiere Pro, Resolve, Pro Tools, and sometimes After Effects and Photoshop. Would doing the OS to the SSD swap be ok for someone like me? The slowdown he encountered seemed to be from from heavy web-development type stuff, which I don’t think I would encounter doing what I do. Does this seem right?
Hi I was thinking about buying an external SSD like the want you're showing here, My Mac mini M1 have 16GB of Ram and 512GB of Internal Disk (which is almost full) I do some video editing not that super intensive 4k and audio stuff in audition or premiere, do you think It will work for me because probably the swap won't affect me since I have 16 of Ram?
Sounds simple and the savings are off the scale. Base M2 with 16gb ram. fab and the savings are £400
Thank You for this information and data! Subscribed. Best Regards and Best Wishes!
Thanks for the sub!
I got over 3500Mb/s write and 2500 read speeds with external 40Gb/s connection. With good and short USB 4 cable.
at 2:30 - 40 gigaBIT speeds. 40 gigabytes is 320 gigabits per second, which is not possible over thunderbolt. Transfer rates are always measured in gigabits per second. So if you have a 100 megabit internet connection, you are only getting 12.5 megabytes per second, not 100 megabytes per second. People always think their internet or transfer rate are blazing fast, when in reality, you need to divide megabits by 8 to get megabytes, which is the metric most people are familiar with. There are 8 bits in one byte.
Yes I agree: most benefit you'll get from updating the RAM. But why are all TH-camrs buying the base-base 8&256. Don't we all agree that in 2023 the minimum amount of RAM is 16? My suggestion for the mini Mac (I like that name more than the Mac Mini. Like mini me): M2 16&512 good minimum. M2 pro 32&1024 good minimum higher level. For more: wait for the M2 Studio.
Silicon macs get more done with less RAM, is why....
Does the base model Mac Mini have dual channel Ram? Single channel ddr5 6400 supports 51.2 GB/s unless your using multiple chips. To get the advertised memory bandwidth of 100 GB/s you need multiple DDR5 channels.
Can you make a video on how to install macOS on a SSD?
Can you set up a swap file on the external drive?
Also, the Seagate Ironwolf 525 nmve ssd can support up to 70% of it's entire contents to be rewritten everyday for 5yr, and still be within warranty
Audio is clean. Keep it up!
Thanks, will do!
What if the internal -non replaceable- drive dies ? Can you still boot with the external and give the mac a new life? (instead of paying crazy money to apple for repairs) -And if yes, but you don't have setup a bootable drive with the OS yet, can you just create it on another mac ?
yes and yes
@@ZhuJo99I know this is old by now but I *had* to respond. Up until the Apple Silicon era the answer was “Yes!” But with Apple Silicon machines the answer is “No!” To even be able to boot the machine (e.g., to an external bootable volume), the internal drive must be accessible and in working order. There is some pre-boot code on there that can only be loaded from the internal (security feature).
Very nice and interesting video. Good job Alex!
Planning to buy my first apple device this year, and it would be a Mac mini m2 (16gb/256gb).
My use case is mainly everyday tasks, doing school projects (studying business IT) and in my free time I started to learn pentest, so I have to use Linux.
@Alex: Would it be fine to use the above mentioned Mac mini with Linux in parallels VM? Right now I have a windows machine and I either use windows or VM, so this would be the same thing with Mac.
It’s interesting why external drive used 10 gb of swap in the same scenario. My M1 512gb air also dies when it reaches 10 gb of swap (I have 8gb air). Maybe there were some unexpected background processes when testing on the external drive, I don’t know. By the way, interesting topic. Thanks for the video!
I expect it is software encoded, so that the process will use more swap in a 1TB drive than in a 256GB drive as Apple knows that 1TB can handle more swap than 256GB before it slows. However, due to the 1Tb internal drives having 4 NAND chips in parallel they can each take some of that swap in their faster MLC memory. I suspect the 1TB external SSD is a single stick so does not have 4X the bandwidth of the internal drives for caching data before it offloads to the much slower storage partition.
@@andyH_England and as far as I know, it is not possible to limit swap in macOS. But if you are right then external drive has to be limited to 256gb and then (theoretically) it should work better than internal ssd because of the speed. Sadly I do not have external drive to test this theory :(
Hey, how did you get the Mac mini to boot using the external drive? Did you use the USB A port? I haven’t been able to boot from the external drive for booting from my M1 iMac, when it used to work fine earlier on my old Intel iMac. I have tried re-installing the macOS version for Big Sur and Monterey when they came out, but none worked :/
you need thunderbolt enclosure
Not a developer but I appreciate you giving us this information
Thank you so much for this video🙌🏾
Hey Alex ...how about the issue with installing software and the drive not giving you the option to "ALLOW" the extension to be installed?..like Universal Audio Apollo Software on macOS Ventura any suggestions?
Hi Alex, will WD_Black™ SN850X 1tb work properly with M2 Pro Mac Mini ? or better to get samsung nvme for enclosure use? also did you get any problem while transferring file from internal to external vise versa , any connection problem, Thank you
Parallels VMs taking up a huge amount of space on that 256 GB drive.. the regular new Mac user doesn't have to worry about running out of space* if they keep to macOS and don't install Parallels.
*I can see the space being used for photos and other files.. But not always a niche thing like Parallels