Cost-Effective Alternatives to Apple's Storage Upgrades

Question

How can one increase storage capacity of Apple devices without spending too much?

Answer 1

It is quite expensive to extend Apples storage by purchasing its options hence an alternative is making your own storage using an NVMe SSD and an enclosure. For instance, a Western Digital Black SN770 NVMe SSD could set you back anywhere from $59 to $126 for size, and combining it with TBU-405 Acasis enclosure which costs $140. It is safer to say that this combination is cheaper than the Apple’s enhancement and also looks better as the transfer speed of data is quicker.

Comments

Thanks for this content. I've been using a couple of Crucial's 1TB external SSDs for video, but they fill up very quickly, and they do take a longer than what you demonstrated to copy files.

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For me it's not so much the speed of the drive as it is what I can install on it. On Macs there are many applications, plug-ins, etc that won't allow you to install them on an external drive. The only way I found around that problem is to clone the Macs drive with the OS and then boot from the external cloned drive, then some applications were able to run from that drive.

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A few comments about SSD drives: The smaller the drive, the less overprovisioning in the drive, which means it will last less long than a larger SSD. So, the 2TB drives will tend to last longer than the 1TB drives. Additionally, all SSDs have a cache to make them appear faster than they really are. The only test you did that got beyond that cache was the two large file test. That will have shown the actual speed of the drive.

And the reason why Apple’s larger internal drive is faster on the M2 Mac is because there are two physical NAND chips on the motherboard (which is the storage). Writing to and reading from two NAND chips is faster than just one. I think that Apple’s low-end drive offering is designed to meet a price point with a less-useful system. I would not purchase the 256-MB system; there is not enough room for the OS and for applications on that drive. Also, you would have to move your /User space to the external drive. On a laptop, that would be a real pain.

Finally, you lose ports for every drive you plug in. With the M2 Mac Mini, if you are operating with two Apple Studio Displays, you have no Thunderbolt ports, save the USB3 ports on the display. The Mac Mini with the M2 Pro has four Thunderbolt ports, so an external drive is a possibility. Now, not everyone is going to hook two Apple Studio monitors up to a Mac Mini but the limitations in these systems quickly become apparent when hooking up peripherals.

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Do you find choosing the cheapest drive as you did detrimental to performance when you start to fill up the drive? I went with a couple of cheaper kingston sticks and although they were blazing fast at first after filling them up to over 60%, performance dropped by over 75%. I’m now inclined to stick to the more expensive pro sticks.

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Question, considering switching to Mac Mini from Desktop PC. I own several apple products, I only use computer for media viewing and editing content for my tennis channel. Don't do gaming on computer at all. I see there is rumor of M4 processor coming to Mac Mini potentially. Should I wait since my PC is still working fine or go ahead and buy a mac mini with 16GB RAM and 256GB hard drive plus external drive as you mentioned? If you recommend buying mac mini now and not to wait, do I need to get the M2 Pro?