An external monitor is more versatile than an iMac because the space that you devote to an external monitor on your desk can be used with any other computer or set of computers, whereas an iMac can’t be used as an external display. I currently have an MBP and 2 Windows machines connected to my LG ultrawide and can switch any 1 or combination of 2 of them onto the display.
1 Like
Just saying, a mini can be just fine. See this photo I took at work in 2015 before I retired.
Two computers. The big one on the left is an HP workstation, with a Xeon processor and spinning hard disk drives. A couple years old at the time. It connects only to the leftmost monitor, keyboard, and mouse. You can’t see on the right a 2009 Mac mini with an SSD. It drives the center and right monitor. I brought it into work primarily for documentation, until I found out that it was faster than the HP for embedded software development.
I still have it and three other minis in the house. They seem to run forever.
1 Like
What do folks use for external storage? I currently have an aging 2010 iMac upgraded with 256 SSD and 2 TB HD. I suppose I could get 256 GB in the Mini and repackage the 2TB in an external casing. But relying on an external HD seems more failure-prone to me.
Depends on your budget and size/speed needs. Nothing wrong with external drives in my opinion. If you can toss your current storage into a $15 plastic USB 3 case try it!
My basic recommendation for portable use is a Samsung T5 external USB 3.1 SSD (500Gb for $90, 1Tb for $180, 2Tb for $320). (If you need faster, get the X-series Thunderbolt line is roughly twice the price.) If you need desktop backup storage or large-capacity drives for video, I’ve got a couple of these powered $150 8Tb Seagate externals that work well and are cheap and quiet.
2 Likes
I got 1 TB in my Mac Mini because it’s actually reasonably priced for what it is, a high speed SSD. If I wasn’t doing video work (large files), I wouldn’t have bothered.
Still, the convenience and reduced mental load of being able to keep all my working files and iCloud documents on one super speedy drive has been great.
- if you have a lot of files in iCloud and want them all on the machine, I recommend getting an internal drive big enough to reduce headaches if you can afford it. Otherwise I agree with bowline that there is nothing wrong with using external storage
I also have a 500 GB Samsung T5 that I use for various things throughout the year, and a 3 TB bus-powered Seagate drive (I think) for backup and media.
What are the speeds like for the Samsung T5 SSD? Close enough to having an internal drive? I’m thinking about getting a newer computer and could all the personal files on 500 GB for the Mac. I don’t have large files for video or audio work. Then I was going to buy a T5 for just extra files.
(I’m not bowline but) With my mini, I measure the internal SSD as really really fast, such that no reasonably-priced external can match it.
Measuring with 1 GB sequential reads and writes (random would be much less) speeds are 2751 MB/s write, and 2663 MB/s read.
By contrast via the 5bps USB ports on the mini, a Samsung T5 measures 452 MB/s write, 521 MB/s read. A spinning drive in an external case might be as slow as 104 MB/s write, 114 MB/s read (to be sure, in my case those measurements are from a very full drive.)
A RAID with NVME SSDs over Thunderbolt 3 might reach the speeds of the internal; I have an external RAID box with spinning drives that reaches 1332 MB/s write, 667 MB/s read, but that box is neither small nor noiseless.
All that being said, I think the experience of any SSD connected even by USB to the Mac mini is fast enough such that one doesn’t have to think about it more.
3 Likes
No hard data, but I have a T5 via USB-C to my 2018 Mini and it feels about as fast as the built-in hard drive. Blows the doors off moving data to/from spinning disks. 
As Timo noted external T5 speeds are approximately 500 Mb/s for read and write, which is still very fast, and for accessing files will be much faster than a spinning disk. If you spend 2x the money for the X5 Thunderbolt units you’s get speeds roughly equivalent to internal SSD speeds.
I would only recommend the X-series drives (at current prices) for people who do a lot of video work or expect to use the external drive as a boot drive. T5 (or the newer, slightly faster T7 drives with fingerprint ID sensors) are the sweet spot for external SSD price/performance right now.
The T-series units are (or at least used to be) formatted as Ex-FAT so you’d just need to use Disk Utility to reformat them as GUID and you’re ready to go.
3 Likes
The T5 sounds like it would work well for my situation. Just to have additional storage without paying up for a bigger SSD. Thanks @Timo, @webwalrus, and @bowline for the responses.
1 Like
I’d also like some advice on this subject!
I am considering buying a Mac Mini as a home server/backup computer.
The cost of the internal SSD seems rather “keen” and I’m wondering if attaching various drives might be the best solution. I could attach several Samsung T5 SSDs or go with a 7200 rpm spinning G Technology drive (available at the Apple store) or similar. Does it really matter which I go for if I’m using the drive primarily as an archive for our media (films, TV shows, music etc.)
For an archive (and not data constantly accessed and re-saved, ie video editing) then cheap mass spinning storage should be fine. If you’re into G-Technology (a Western digital subsidiary) you can pick up two 6Gb external drives for $400, and use one to back up the other.
For your purpose, spinning drives are more cost effective, though they probably don’t have the longevity of SSDs. Spinning drives are not silent though, so if drive noise is likely to bother you then that’s a vote in favour of SSD. Personally in your case I’d go with spinning (plus spinning for backup).
Attaching external spinning drives gives you the maximum expandability. I swapped out the original internal spinner for an SSD. Most of the data is “served” slowly – for streaming and backup, so drive performance doesn’t really matter.
My externals are all in OWC Mercury Elite Pro enclosures. They are aluminum so the drives keep cool even without fans. https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3QHKIT0GB/
My mini server looks like this:
The drive toaster is used to clone the externals for backups. Everything but the toaster faces the wall and it all sits on a shelf near the floor. The whole system has a capacity of 16TB.
2 Likes
I have a variety of types of attached storage to my Mac mini.
- for Time Machine – a 2.5" spinning hard drive like these. One doesn’t need speed here, but I like the small form factor and that it is bus-powered
- for a clone of the start-up drive – a 2.5" SSD the same size as my boot disk, such that I can boot from it if something goes wrong with the boot disk. Also bus-powered; I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make the bootable clone each night
- for storage – a box of 3.5" spinning disks in a RAID enclosure. I’m using a hardware RAID right now but I prefer software raids (SoftRAID) going forward. (While hardware RAIDs as I measure them are faster, I prefer SoftRAID’s interface to the more inscrutable web-based hardware management options)
- for backup / archiving – over the home network to a NAS in the cellar. On my machine Arq (version 5!) runs constantly backing up the RAID box with versions. There is a thread in these fora about using Arq as a back up to a NAS box
I just went through this whole mess in December - although I was buying it for a workstation. 
When I was buying my Mini, my thought process was basically:
First ,how much data needs to actually be on the Mac itself? Anything that’s necessary for the machine to function must be internal to the computer in my view, even if it’s possible to locate it on an external disk. External disks sometimes take a bit of time to mount, or need to be checked for errors if they unmount “dirty”. So things like iCloud Drive, your apps, and anything those apps absolutely must have to run should be on the internal volume. And unless I’m not remembering properly, you can’t “selective sync” iCloud Drive - you can only turn it on and off.
Second, how close am I to the storage tier? SSDs work best and last longer if they have some room to work - so if you’re planning to store 225 GB of data, you probably don’t want a 250 GB SSD.
Third, how fast do I need to be able to access my other data? As @bowline mentioned, cheap mass spinning storage is fine for anything that doesn’t need quick access. I have both external spinning disks (stuff that doesn’t need to access fast, like Plex), and an external SSD for storing things that need faster access but that are large enough that I’d prefer to not burn the write cycles on the internal SSD. So I have WD My Books, a Samsung T5, and a drive dock.
Fourth, once you have all the parameters above, what’s available refurbished? When I buy a Mac I get my “need to have” parameters nailed down, price that Mac brand new, and then go look at the refurbs. If your exact model that you want is available that way you save some money. If the exact model you want isn’t available that way, it’s not uncommon to find a model with better specs for what you would’ve paid new anyway.
Set an alert at a site like refurb.me for Apple Store only refurbs. And if the exact model you want comes available, be ready to jump on it - they go fast!
Hope that’s at least a bit helpful.
2 Likes
Thank you for the advice webwalrus and others. You’ve given me quite a lot to think about as I plot my Mac Mini purchase. In particular, the sound of whirring spinning disks is something to ponder as the Mac mini will be under out telly. I assume the mini itself is pretty silent under normal operation?
The only thing in the 2018 that makes any noise is the fan, so unless you’re doing something that’s grinding on the processor, the Mini is pretty much absolutely silent.
If you’re putting it under a television just make sure that the area where it is has adequate airflow, and don’t stack other things on top of it (or stack it on top of things that are going to get hot).
Also, keep in mind that as long as the connection is reliable you can access things like Plex across a network - so the Mini wouldn’t necessarily even have to be in the same room as the TV if that’s your only concern.
If you periodically run it through the dishwasher, you’ll find that it will make no noise at all. 
1 Like
For under the tv, I’d wager if you were running demanding games (or any game in Boot Camp) the fans would start up and they can be fairly loud.
I only ever notice when encoding with Final Cut Pro and it doesn’t bother me.