External HDD/SDD for Mac mini M2

Any HDD or SSD from a reputable maker should be fine.

Don't get hung up by speeds as they are not important unless you are copying hundreds of gigabytes daily from one drive to another.

I have my M2 mini running off a cheap Crucial 1 TB SSD. This means the internal SSD gets no wear and tear and surprisingly the computer is just as fast (FCP video editing) as using the internal SSD except of course for straight transfer of massive files.

I installed Sonoma on the Crucial and boot the mini from that. "Simples", as a certain Russian rodent would say.

It's just the cheapest one I could find . . . actually I had bought it a year earlier (2022) to use as a normal external SSD. It was just conveniently to hand when I got my M2 last October.

Any SSD from one of the well known makes should be perfectly OK. There's nothing special about them.

I've also used a Samsung T5 as a boot disk . . . that also was not bought for that purpose.

Crucial has a sale right now (2024-03-15) on their new external X9 Pro SSD (USB 3.2 Gen 2 rated at 1050 MB/s).

• 1 TB = $99USD
• 2 TB = $159USD

These are warrantied for 5 years, and the previous generation X8 SSDs have been in use here on several Macs (including my M2 Mac Mini Pro) since 2022 without any issues.

Amazon is a good source and currently they have 1 TB Crucial SSDs for £66 upwards and 2 TB from £101.

SSDs available in UK

You’re correct - external 3.2 drives with 10 Gbps are limited to overpriced, over marketed, over engineered & overhyped, so-called external SSDs. Avoid. Good decision limiting your choices instead to trusty 5 Gbps externals. I’m very happy with Toshiba - good value for money + 3 year warranty which I’ve used only once but painlessly (replaced promptly with new).

https://storage.toshiba.com/consumer-hdd

Sago48 wrote:

I'd like to make full use the available speed of the USB 3 on the mini. However, I'm not finding external hard drives that will run on the USB 3 at the 10GB speed claimed/mentioned by Apple.

The M2 and M2 Pro Mac minis support USB speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second (625 megabytes per second) on their USB-A ports, and up to 10 gigabits per second (1250 megabytes per second) on their USB-C ports. These are the usual "speeds before overhead."

You'll be lucky to find a mechanical hard drive which can transfer data much faster than 160 megabytes per second. If the mechanical drive is the bottleneck, it won't make much difference whether you attach it via USB-A (USB 3.0) or USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen 2).

So I'm looking for 2TB external HDD suggestions. Or advice on other ways to think about my storage problem,. For example, might I daisy-chain my 2012 mini with my M2 mini?

Not if you're thinking about doing it with USB. That's not how USB works.

You could set one up as a network file server for the other, but that would be slower than using an external drive, and possibly less convenient as well.

Warranty is slightly sneaky:

”Warranty valid for 5 years from the original date of purchase by an authorized seller, or before writing the maximum total bytes written (TBW) as published in the product datasheet and as measured in the product’s SMART data, whichever comes first.” - that data sheet isn’t on the page or anywhere I looked.

Nevertheless, a good find! The added language is presumably to protect from abusive testing which I’m guessing is widely prevalent. +1

Yvw. See https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/canvio-flex/

Hi, did you source a suitable SSD in the UK afterwards? I'm in a similar position and need to add storage as soon as I can.