You will be comparing your fast new Mac Mini with your slow old one, and this will probably have a much bigger impact than the differences between internal and external SSDs. However, you should see a dramatic improvement whichever type of storage you choose. Suffice it to say that the best way to tell what kind of external SSD and connection you really need – which could be a version of USB 3.0 rather than Thunderbolt – is to test it with your own software and data. That will make far more difference to performance than picking a drive that looks “fast” because it’s good at sequential reads. However, if you need to do a lot of reads and writes, it’s better to choose an SSD that does those things quickly. You don’t need a fast external drive if you mainly use it for streaming music and videos. For example, SSDs can stream data much faster than they can read and write random data. Inside the PC, they include the path to the processor and how many lanes (see below) are available for data. If speed is critical – which I doubt – then a 2TB internal drive will be faster than a 128GB or 250GB internal drive in the same class.Īn external SSD’s real-world performance will also depend on many other factors, including the type of storage and the interface chips used. However, you should be aware that big SSDs are faster than small SSDs, because the controller can write to more modules at the same time. These beachballs disappeared with 8 GB RAM with this type of usage.The specific question is impossible to answer because there are so many variables. I note that even way back with Sierra/High Sierra my older machines with 4 GB RAM would encounter the beachball from time to time even with SSD and just relatively light usage, meaning a few browser tabs, mail, MS Office, Calendar, Mail, and Calculator open.

I'm curious how well it does on 4 GB RAM. Please post your results once you have Monterey installed on the SSD. However, if you plan on having say 500 GB on your boot drive, then yeah, a 1 TB Time Machine drive makes sense. They say you really only need about 2-3X the capacity of your data used.

Click to expand.How much data do you have and will be using in the foreseeable future? If say only 125 GB, then I wouldn't bother swapping out the 500 GB hard drive.

What ssd for mac mini 2014