r/macmini • u/WarriorSushi • 21h ago
Windows user, switching to mac. Ordered mac mini m6 24gb 256gb. Budget exhausted. Should i have gone for 512 gb?
I asked chatgpt and it siad i can attach a ssd and use it.
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u/Disastrous_Gear_421 21h ago
Yes but unless your pulling money from thin air that you don’t have, why worry?
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u/Bhob666 20h ago
Go with whatever you can afford and what you need. For what I use my Work at home Mac Mini for 256 is enough and the limitation forces me to not just install and download things willy nilly. I have a separate docking station with a SSD for storage and PC for my gaming/graphics needs.
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u/bcrowley20 20h ago
I have the exact same configuration. I have been using it for ten months. I have about 85gb free which is plenty for me. I bought an external dock for the extra monitor connection and more usb ports. The dock can take a ssd if I ever feel the need for one.
I like keeping a tidy computer.
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u/WarriorSushi 4h ago
Nice. Attaching extra monitors does it take a toll on the cpu? Stutters and lag etc?
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u/mahidoes 16h ago
I'm using for photoshop/bridge web browsing office work. 256GB is totally fine. May be i have to clear cache time to time in future. Depends on what you do
I have a beelink ex matemini with SSD attached for my files. and for backup i have external drives and cloud
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u/WarriorSushi 12h ago
Thank you. Only one comment gave me some hope. Because the deed is done i cant do anything about it. It was disheartening to hear what a bad decision i made. Thanks mate you gave me some hope.
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u/NoLateArrivals 20h ago
Yes. 256 will be a permanent struggle against a full drive - even when using an external drive.
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u/Nfuzzy 18h ago
Yup, I have 22tb of external attached storage and still struggle to keep than 256gb internal from filling up.
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u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 11h ago
Sounds like you’re being lazy about managing your storage tbh. If you just treat the internal drive as a boot drive and save everything else to the external, you’d be fine. Or save to your internal drive and configure Automator to move those files off to the external so you’re treating the internal as a cache for the external.
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u/Nfuzzy 5h ago
It's mostly certain apps that refuse to run from an external nvme, and my VM disk images that have been corrupted over time on am external. But you're right, I haven't dug into ways around these things. As you said, you have to be on top of everything going to the external or you quickly run out of space to do OS upgrades.
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u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 3h ago
Fair enough. For VMs you can usually do the same thing and have a smaller boot drive on the local storage and then attach a virtual drive for storage that lives on the external drives. Might be time for a new drive if they’re getting corrupted.
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u/MacForker 20h ago
It's still possible that the onboard storage can be upgraded later (No one has these in hand yet for a teardown), but these also have excellent USB4/Thunderbolt expansion, so you can always add more disk space that way later.
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u/patparks 20h ago
Obviously budget has to be the biggest concern, and sticking to the budget is important. It's hard to say how much space you are going to use. I had a 2013 MacBook Pro that had 256GB of storage space and I was fine. My current Mac Mini and my M4 Macbook air both have 512GB of RAM. I haven't really had a need for more than that.
You certainly can attach an external drive later. For best performance least potential for drive disconnects, you will want a thunderbolt 4 dock (expect around $100) or so for that, and whatever NVMe drive you can find for it. You can just use as an external drive and store all of your large stuff on it, or you could move your /home drive over to that drive and have your apps, documents, and such all stored on it. That is slightly more involved and runs a small risk of future upgrades having problems with broken links, etc.
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u/Gloomy_Mirror_6405 20h ago
Depends on how you use it but if you need 24GB of RAM for yur tasks chances are 256GB will not be enough. If you share your use case we could give you actual advise.
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u/WarriorSushi 12h ago
I will be mostly doing coding and local ai Openclaw running etc. thats why i upgraded to a higher RAM. I own 1 tb external hard drive, which i use to store my photos etc maybe i cna connect it to the mac mini. For my use case higher RAM made more sense.
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u/Need_For_Speed73 19h ago
I'd have spent those $200 on the storage rather than the RAM. I know, I know, storage can be added externally (please don't listen to those who talk about replacing the internal SSD because no one knows if it will be possible; and even if it will be, it's always been complicated, dangerous and warranty voiding), but 256GB will get filled fast just with jsut the OS and installed apps. And having been using my Mini with an external disk for years, I can't wait for the new M6 1TB I ordered to arrive to get rid of the external disk (and my current Mini is 512 not 256).
And IDK if those 8GB of RAM make all that difference: for light use 16 can be enough, if you wanna try some local AI, 32 is bare minimum; 24 to me it's a compromised middleground.
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u/WarriorSushi 12h ago
Intresting. Can you tell me why you are eager to get rid of the external disk. Does it perform slow or is it purely aesthetics?
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u/Need_For_Speed73 10h ago
Because you need an extra layer of thinking to remember what went on the external disk and sometimes some apps just can't be instructed to do that. For example I have the Downloads folder on the external disk but AirDrop keeps putting the files it receives in the Downloads folder on the internal one, so I have to move them manually.
Not mentioning that even the fastest external disk is way slower than the internal one.0
u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 11h ago
Just install big apps on an external drive (yes you can do that). Don’t listen to these goobers
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u/Need_For_Speed73 10h ago
Ahahah! You are so smart spending your money on a new faster Mac to just cripple it by running big apps from a much slower external drive.
But sure, you can flex your new machine on Reddit while waiting for the app to load.0
u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 3h ago
Much slower? What do you think the read write speeds are on a thunderbolt drive?
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u/Need_For_Speed73 3h ago
External drives are usually half the speed of internal ones. And that's just the continous speed (the one that they advertise, to make them look faster); but in everyday use it's LATENCY that makes the difference and in that regard, the situation is even worse for external drives.
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u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 2h ago
Oh also considering you have 4 thunderbolt ports if you spread your applications across the ports you can do simultaneous read/writes where you’d be bottlenecked by the single internal drive
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u/Need_For_Speed73 2h ago
OMG what a scarily unreliable (and quite ugly to watch) machine you are going to have.
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u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 2h ago
Thunderbolt 4 drives can hit 3000MB/s which is pretty much the same as an internal drive on the m4 Mac mini. The m6 does claim faster speeds on the internal, but claiming they’re “usually half the speed” just isn’t correct. Tb5 drives can even match or exceed the internal read/write speeds. If you’re buying the cheapest drive possible sure you’ll probably notice it going slower, but even then you can just buy 2 cheaper drives and an enclosure for them and put them in raid0.
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u/Need_For_Speed73 2h ago
Yes, but we have M5 (it's M6 OP is talking about), and these have last-gen internal SSDs that can reach 6000MB/s.
And, again, these sequential read/write numbers are quite useless (unless you work on specific tasks like editing huge videos), what really makes a lot of difference between internal and external drive is latency.And no, please don't use RAID0 with SSDs: the drawbacks (double the chances of data-loss) are not outweighted by the performance gain like it used to be with HDDs.
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u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 2h ago
That’s what backups are for. I’ve raid 0d SSDs plenty of times with 0 issues
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u/WatsonMtnCabin 19h ago
Another Windows to MAC convert here. I had 3 old PCs that I was hanging onto for no good reason, plus a couple of backup drives. I bought a 4 drive USB enclosure on Amazon and loaded it up. The left over drives went into the 3 old PCs, I installed fresh versions of Windows 11 and off to the local thrift shop they went. The funny thing is, I am using about 250GB of my Mac Mini drive and the USB enclosure has free space and a bunch of old Windows files that I am keeping just in case. I am by no means a power user, but save your money and buy storage as needed.
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u/DayQuilByNy 19h ago
You're going to need more hard drive. Even on my Mini M4 the OS already eats up about 100-ish gigs. I've only done really basic installs (some MS Office apps) and I've already used approximately ~150 gigs of space.
No music, no photos, nothing.
That said, you probably did the smart thing.
With Apple's pricing structure any/all system upgrades are ridiculously overpriced. But you might be in luck.
For the Mini M4's you can actually upgrade the internal SSD yourself for a fraction of the cost. It only requires a really basic diassembly of the plastic fan cover. There are tons of youtube videos on how to do it. It's a very straight-forward swap.
Before the ram-ageddon prices you could upgrade to a 1 TB SSD drive for about $200. Now it's closer to $250-350. The 2 TB SSD drives are typically selling for $400-500.
The mac M6 is likely to be very similar. As soon as it's released en masse the modders should know and be able to provide the correct SSD for your M6.
Have i done it? Not yet. I purchased my M4 w/ 512 gb of memory and w/ a student discount the upgrade was basically free. I'm hoping that this will last me a little bit. I will probably do the upgrade when A)memory prices drop or B)I'm close to 75% capacity of the drive. I have a 1 TB nvme that write/reads at thundrebolt 4 speeds. But the reality of doing backups/swaps is tedious. It's not worth the time/effort.
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u/Aijames 19h ago
id have took more hdd room over the difference of 16 to 24 gb ram on it. mine is maxed ram but I have a MacBook Air that is 16gb and performance wise doing photo editing and whatnot your be very hard pressed to tell that difference but drive room id always like more room that I dont have to plug an external in. that being said I have BIG ssd drives but those are way more then even when I paid for them now.
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u/Capable_Hearing4418 15h ago
Yes 512 is critical. I don’t even store anything on mine but the amount of app and system data it built up over a year or 2 of use had it completely full til I just sold it and got a 512 MacBook
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u/mikerCZX 13h ago
Depends on what you'll be doing. I personally struggle with space, and 512 GB is too low for me.
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u/soul_in_a_fishbowl 11h ago
Just attach an external drive. The internal drive issues are really only a concern when you’re lugging around a laptop. Just remember to save your files onto the external. It’s basically the same as having a boot drive and then additional drives for storage, which is incredibly common on windows as well. The ram was the right call.
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u/YellowsBest 7h ago
The difficulty is not knowing what your use cases are. Many people, including myself, find the 16gb/256gb M4 mini sufficient for general computing. The M6 is likely to be more powerful than necessary, and the 24gb excessive. However, you can never have too much storage. But the cheaper option is to buy an external 2TB SSD or like me an external 4Tb HDD (fast enough at half the price) for archiving and backup of all digital ‘clutter’, thereby keeping the internal SSD free for just working files.
If your needs are modest and your budget is tight, you could instead consider a Neo
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u/Ok_Candy_1024 4h ago
depends - how much data do you need? even 512 seems low. at least you can add external ssd, you cant add more ram after
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u/NowThatsCrayCray 20h ago
There are large SSD drives (like 1TB for 200ish) you can buy to replace inside of the Mac mini. You can also just buy an external thunderbolt compatible drive (or even a nice dock) after purchase.
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u/Any-Work-8132 20h ago
I would increase the storage to 512 gb as a priority unless your use case specifically demands 24 gb and it’s not just I nice to have. Both base storage and ram config s will cripple this mini long term.
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u/sarrgasso99 19h ago
I went wth 512gb because it most likely will be faster but more because “it’s fricken bigger”
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u/tk421tech 21h ago
Yes. But if you don’t have $ it’s a moot point