I am one of the biggest fans of Apple’s latest Mac mini – but there is one glaring problem…

The M4 Pro Mac mini was, without a doubt, my best Apple purchase of 2024.

I bought two Mac minis – the standard M4 version, which I returned and the M4 Pro Mac mini, which not only did I keep but has ended up becoming my daily machine. After three years of hard use, my M1 Max MacBook Pro has been eased to one side as the Apple new poster boy of the moment takes pride of place.

And let me be clear about this point – there is nothing wrong with my MacBook Pro – it’s simply that the M4 Pro Mac mini is better!

I’ve written many pieces about what the M4 Pro Mac mini is like to use – its many pros and a few cons, so I am not going to cover old ground with this story. It’s a brilliant machine, and if you want to start using a Mac, the Mac mini is a fantastic place to get into macOS.

This story, though, at the risk of sounding like an edition of Star Trek, will be about my little journey of discovery about storage and my Mac mini.

Not all is equal

Hopefully, when you read my stories, they come across as an honest recount of what I’ve bought, how I use them and the problems I come up against.

Although I am a confessed geek and nerd, I am a fairly normal nerd, the everyman nerd as it were! What I mean by that is I don’t come from an IT background or electronics degree. I just like using tech and Apple gear.

Quite possibly, I am just like you, an average user muddling through and finding my way. The only difference is that I’ve kind of stumbled into making videos and writing about Apple gear, and it has (oddly) become a full-time gig – something else I happen to love doing, too!

So, as we are going to be talking about storage, I guess a good place to start would be to remind you of the details of the Mac I have on my desk.

My M4 Pro Mac mini is spec’d like this;

• Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
• 48GB unified memory
• 1 TB SSD storage
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
  

Before buying the M4 Pro Mac mini, all the rumours were that the M4 Pro chip was going to be pretty damned special, so I spec’d and bought this M4 Pro Mac mini with the mindset that it would likely replace my M1 Max MacBook Pro.

Most of the tick boxes were pretty self-explanatory. I wanted the M4 Pro chip with the extra cores to handle my video, audio and photo workflow with a healthy dollop of memory to match. Apple silicon tends to be so efficient that I didn’t think I’d need more than 48GB – and so far, I’ve been proven right. The 10GB Ethernet port was simply a cheap, future-proofing luxury in case I should ever go the networked NAS drive route, or if full fibre ever comes my way.

This brings us neatly around to the last and most contentious option – storage.

Apple’s onboard option is the most convenient and, until recently, the quickest form of storage. Although convenient, one of the downsides or risks with having everything on your Mac’s internal SSD is if it should die or get stolen, you’ve suddenly lost everything. But, there’s no escaping the fact it is convenient.

Of course, that is only one of the benefits of going the slightly less convenient external SSD route. Not only are you safe from having to spring out for a new Mac if the worse should happen but you can also swap what Mac you are working on by simply plugging that SSD into another workstation. So what you lose in convenience, you gain in flexibility. Swings and roundabouts!

You see – even with storage, there are pros and cons.

So, naturally, when we get to the storage option as we are choosing a new Mac, we find ourselves hesitating, doubting & double-guessing ourselves. We may want those extra terabytes of storage, but by god, you’d best be ready to dig deep into your pockets to afford it.

And, with Apple painfully aware that these new breed of Macs are lasting longer than ever, the company has had to look to screw every last penny out of us at the checkout, which I’m sure is why they are charging so much for memory & storage upgrades – although you could argue they always have!

So, to save a few pounds or dollars, many of us decide to go light on Apple’s storage and buy some kind of third-party external SSD.

But as I’ve learned – not all SSDs and storage are the same.

M4 Pro Mac mini – going easy

I knew that the 1TB I’d chosen wouldn’t last me long, and with Apple silicon Macs, of course, you only get one bite at the storage cherry. What you spec will have to last you forever. There’s no swapping or upgrading. The possibility of buyer’s remorse has never been more real.

Although I’d say I’m pretty cautious with what I put on or keep on Mac, for the kind of work I do, 1TB was always going to be on the skinny side – and I was aware of that – but £2300 was more than enough to pay for this mini.

Storage, for me, gets eaten up on a weekly cycle with that week’s video. For instance, the Final Cut Pro file that sits on my desktop during the week can often easily swell to 80GB or 100GB. That means I routinely get the message popping up telling me I’m low on storage.

Out of interest, before I started to write this story, I checked where I was at with storage after nearly two months of use, with the desktop now clear of this week’s video file.

So far, I’ve nabbed around 250GB of the available 1TB SSD – and that’s with me being careful! Storage has this nasty way of getting eaten up, which is why you can never have enough of it.

Although I have long-term plans of going the NAS route – that is a costly choice and also one that I understand is pretty tricky to initially get set up. So, for now, I’ve ruled it out.

But, I knew I needed to address the elephant in the room and began to try and learn more about what my best options were for extra storage for my lovely M4 Pro Mac mini.

The learning curve

Until fairly recently, I thought that an SSD was an SSD – I mean, how complicated could it be? One extra gigabyte was the same as the next, no?

As you’ve probably gathered, I’d always been fairly ignorant about SSDs. I’d bought plenty over the year, but just either to dump backup files on, to store archives on or use as a Time Capsule.

I think it was only when the iPhones switched to USB-C, and we had LOG and ProRes video that I bought an SSD with any real care or thought. I noticed that the port on the iPhone had 10Gbps transfer speeds. I wanted to buy a dedicated SSD to record on, so I took time to check the specs carefully before buying, as I wanted to maximise the transfer speeds.

I ended up getting a 1TB Samsung T7. It’s small, lightweight and has been ultra-reliable. I can often record for 30 or 40 minutes at a time, and even with those 80GB files, it’s never let me down.

It’s proven to be perfect for the purpose I bought it for. These small, portable SSDs are a great solution for transferring or storing files. I could happily build up a bank of these for keeping my archive files on, for instance.

But late last year, when I was testing between the M4 Pro Mac mini and the standard Mac mini, I used it to edit a video from, and that’s when I found its breaking point.

The T7 and, I’m guessing, similar alternatives overheated. My timeline froze in Final Cut, and I assumed, at first, it was the M4 Pro Mac mini complaining – a fairly natural first reaction. But then I felt the Samsung drive, and it was boiling from all that read/writing that had been going on. I had to wait about half an hour for it to cool down before I could carry on working. Less than ideal.

Lesson learned – this wasn’t going to be my long-term storage solution for the M4 Pro Mac mini.

Options

After Apple announced that both the M4 Pro Mac mini and M4 MacBook Pro would come with Thunderbolt 5 ports, I said at the time it wouldn’t take long for third-party Thunderbolt 5 SSDs to flood onto the market. It’s no surprise that has played out, and now there are quite a few to choose from.

Could a Thunderbolt 5 SSD enclosure be the answer?

One name kept cropping up as being one of the best. Chatting with other creators in a similar position to me, they told me to take a look at Acasis.

The enclosure I chose was the latest from Acasis – the 80Gbps TB501 enclosure. Remember I told you how fresh and naive I was about external SSDs? After it arrived I had no idea that all I was getting was the enclosure – the memory isn’t included! At least you get the truth from me!

So the enclosure costs about £250 ($299), and the 2TB Samsung 990 Eco Pro Plus memory I have chosen costs £140. That means I’ve spent £390 to add 2TB of, hopefully, usable and quick SSD storage to my M4 Pro Mac mini compared to Apple, which is charging £600. That’s a pretty healthy saving, so long as it’s ok to use.

Now I’ve got my head into these NVMe storage enclosures – I’m starting to see the benefits of them. For starters, you can easily swap, upgrade and switch the SSD. I’ve started with ‘only’ 2TB, but I can easily change that at any time. I took Acasis’ advice and went with Samsung this time, but I figured if I didn’t like that, I could try another kind next time – maybe Crucial, for instance. I also like that this Acasis enclosure doesn’t need any power – it’s powered via the Thunderbolt 5 cable, and no tools are needed to change the memory with this Acasis enclosure either.

I’m not sure if that’s standard with other similar enclosures, but everything so far is leaning towards this being a fantastic choice for my storage solution. On the convenience front – it’s ticking boxes.

And, having decided to use this TB501 also means that for the first time, I’ll be tapping into the power of those Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back of my M4 Pro Mac mini.

So, let’s look at numbers!

What’s all the fuss about Thunderbolt 5

There are a couple of tests I’m going to do in an attempt to give you a feel of what this Thunderbolt 5 enclosure is like.

I’ll edit this week’s video from it – from start to finish. That will give it a pretty thorough working over – that will be the most stress I would ever put it through, so if it passes that test, I’ll be on to a winner. At that point, I’ll know if it’s going to be a viable alternative to working from Apple’s internal SSD and if this external SSD is actually a saving or a false economy. It could also mean I can delay longer the idea of introducing a NAS drive into my workflow.

I’ve decided to use the Blackmagicdesign Disk Speed Test. Generally, I don’t like benchmark tests like this, but in this instance, the numbers will mean something. I’ll use the 5GB test file on the Acasis/Samsung drive, the Samsung T7 drive and then on the Mac mini SSD via the desktop.

I’ve used a 12GB LaCie 2big Raid for a few years now as my storage/archive solution – but it’s started to feel slow. Now I know why – when I bought that 12TB raid in 2020, it was ‘state-of-the-art’ and considered quick. Looking at the box as I’m writing this, it’s telling me it has ’shocking’ data transfer speeds of…20Gb/s. Yet here we are in 2025 with Thunderbolt 5 and 80Gb/s data transfer speeds! No wonder that raid seems slow and old now!

I was going to try moving a large 52GB file from that LaCie raid onto both the Acasis enclosure and the desktop as part of this experiment, but even I realised that it would be limited by the USB 3 cable that it uses, so it would prove nothing.

Numbers talk

Firstly, the results of the 5GB Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. The Acasis was getting regular read/write speeds of around 5700MB/s, running the test about 10 or 12 times to get a good average feeling of what was going on. In the same test on the M4 Pro Mac minis desktop, I was seeing speeds of 6300MB/s write and 5000MB/s read. The Samsung T7 only recorded speeds of 860MB/s write and 720MB/s read – which I guess was no surprise.

So, from what I’m seeing so far, the Acasis enclosure is behaving more or less, as well as the internal Apple SSD.

What I need to do now is get editing to see how it performs with that…I’ll be back with my final thoughts…

Set up

Before I go and start testing what it’s like to edit on, though, a word about the set-up. When I first plugged in the Samsung 990 Eco Plus earlier today, I got an error message on screen telling me the ‘disk was not readable’.

It’s less sinister than it appears, though. All it means is that SSD, out of the box, is not formatted. The fix is super simple. Open Disk Utility, highlight the drive and click on erase. Then it’ll give you the option to format it, and from what I’ve learned, the best choice is APFS (Apple File System). APFS is journaled, efficient and designed if you only intend to use the drive on Macs. If you need to switch between Windows and Mac may be consider using ExFat as the format.

Ok, I’ll come back with my final thoughts in a few days after I’ve spent some time editing on it.

Final thoughts and experiences

In short – it’s brilliant!

I’m writing this on the back of having spent the best part of two 10-hour days editing a full YouTube video from the Acasis enclosure on my M4 Pro Mac mini, and it was faultless.

It was quick – every bit as quick as editing from the Mac itself. I had no issues, and it was quiet the entire time. There is the tiniest of hums coming from it, but honestly, it’s barely noticeable. And it never got hot. It got warm, but only as warm as the Mac mini itself.

I entered into this test a little sceptical, but now I am starting to think that Apple may have shot itself in the foot by giving us Thunderbolt 5 ports. It now means that it is possible to buy quick, efficient, quiet storage after the point of purchase.

And the best part is – it’s so easy to set up and use. Literally, no knowledge is needed – it’s simply plug-and-play. The best way for me to tell you how impressed I’ve been by it is if I tell you that any day now, I’ll be going all in and ordering either a 4TB or, more likely, an 8TB memory strip for the Acasis enclosure.

It turns out you can have your cake and eat it too!