Get more storage for your Mac Mini M4 without paying Apple

Nobody likes to pay the Apple Tax to Tim Cook

8 min readNov 18, 2024

The first thing you will find in brand new your Mac Mini M4 will be the meager storage it includes. You don’t have to pay Apple the ludicrous prices it charges for more storage, but you can “upgrade” it with external drives.

There are two alternatives to expand your storage, and these do not include paying Apple their abusive pricing for upgrading at the checkout. Best of all, it’s way cheaper as long you don’t mind having a cable connected to your Mac Mini at all times:

A prebuilt external SSD or HDD
Your own enclosure and NVMe drive

Cheap drives, twice the buy

Before picking up a storage drive, the golden rule: buy reputable brands from reputable retailers.

Cheap brands will mostly have chips prone to overheat, corrupt or die after a few months, as part of the price is the lack of proper quality assurance. Customer support may be non-existent, so don’t expect easy refunds either.

Unkown retailers, or third-party sellers in a marketplace, may sell fake products, knock-off brands, offer very limited warranty and tell you to return the goods to China without refund promises — chargebacks will be your only option.

Personally, I prefer a good and reliable NVMe from Crucial, Western Digital, Seagate (LaCie and Maxtor), Toshiba, Sabrent, Kingston, Transcend, PNY, Kioxia, Samsung, SanDisk and Lexar, to name the ones I would put my money on.

SSD vs HDD

No matter what you’ll get, you will have to choose between an HDD (hard disk drive) or an SSD (solid state drive). In a nutshell:

HDD will offer more storage per dollar, endurance even when not powered in years, but hard falls will kill them, and these will be slower than an SSD.
SSD will be hundreds of times faster and keep working after hard falls, but smaller than a similarly priced HDD, and will require to be powered up at least occasionally to avoid corruption or data lost.

If you need to constantly back up your data through Time Machine, or store enormous projects, an HDD will make more sense, or even a NAS for pure convenience.

SSD will be the preferred option for almost anybody that doesn’t require TB of data at hand.

Formatting to APFS, exFAT, or both

There is a dilemma about formatting the drive, which is the way the data is stored in the drive.

Apple uses APFS natively. You should format your drive if you plan to use it exclusively with your Mac (or any other Mac). It can encrypt your data, can recover from accidental corruption, and you will need it if you plan to make it your Home drive — check this at the end of the article.

The other alternative is exFAT. You will be forced to use this format if you need to share data between Windows or Linux computers. It lacks encryption, and energy or connection interruptions may corrupt data.

Thanks to the wonders of computing, you are not required to only use one. You can perfectly have a drive with two partitions, one big for APFS alongside a smaller one as exFAT for sharing files across computers.

Prebuilt external drives

If you don’t want the hassle of finding an NVMe or HDD, and a good USB-C enclosure, then you can buy a prebuilt unit.

Prebuilt drives include everything, there is no need to buy anything more and there is zero assembly required. The problem is the price: compared two your own enclosure and drive, these are not cheap.

Not going to blame anybody who wants the easy way to add storage, so prepare your wallet for these lightly made recommendations:

The $80~$120 seems to be a good, sweet spot for value in externals HDD and SSD.

You don’t have to follow these particular models. Just check reviews and comments if you have any doubt of their performance, and more importantly, their endurance.

How much and SSD can last?

I know some people can be worried about SSD wearing. In case you don’t know, writing data in an SSD is like writing in stone: you eventually won’t be able to write anymore as there is no more stone to write on.

There is an excellent article at ZDNet that talks about SSD wearing, but in a nutshell, you shouldn’t worry unless you’re a professional user.

Professionals that move a lot of data should check the Terabytes Written (TBW) the drive supports and calculate apropriately. Heavy users may need to replace the unit in two or three years, so prefer larger drives as they come with bigger TBW.

NVMe enclosures

You have come here for the best bang for your buck, and you will get it. The only caveat is that you will need to assemble your new external drive, but it will be very simple: just a few tightening some screws, formatting the drive to APFS, and that’s it.

Before we start to pick drives, we will need to find a good enclosure. There are three types of NVMe enclosures: 10Gbps, 20Gbps and 40Gbps. No matter how speedy your drive is, the enclosure will dictate its maximum speed as most of the time it will be the bottleneck.

The enclosure market is dominated by Sabrent, OWC, SSK, Ugreen, ACASIS, ORICO, JEYI and Unionsine.

$20 — 10GBps

It has become very easy to find NVMe enclosures with a transfer rate of 10Gbps below $20. If you’re an average user that doesn’t transfer data back and forth, having 1 GB/s maximum transfer rate will be just fine.

Because the speed is on the low end of the spectrum, there is no need to buy high-end speedy drives unless you plan to upgrade to a faster enclosure later.

Here Sabrent is probably the most reliable out there, but you may find some cheaper options from SSK, UGREEN and ORICO. Paying more than $20 its weird because there are no clear features apart from cosmetics, and you may spend it for a better NVMe drive instead.

$40 — 20GBps

For double the money, you can double your transfer rate to around 2 GB/s — the practical maximum speed because there is some overhead from the data transfer.

Most reputable NVMe drives will easily top any enclosure transfer speed. Professional users on the cheap may take these enclosures for the performance bump. The rest rest won’t note a difference.

Here, Sabrent seems like the obvious choice, but also ORICO and UGREEN will offer similar products.

$120 — 40Gbps

Here you will find a lot of enclosures claiming “40Gbps” speeds, but barely reaching 2,700 MB/s. This is because, as Dan S. Charlton excellent article states, these use old Thunderbolt 3 controllers, making them attractive only when below $70.

By going on what the article recommends, the OWC Express 1M2 USB4, HyperDrive NVMe USB4 and ZikeDrive NVMe USB4 enclosures can do the job for $120, toping 3,800 MB/s.

Of course, if you’re paying this amount of money for an NVMe enclosure it’s because you plan to make a lot of sequential data transfer, especially if you work on multimedia, science or big data.

$?— 80GBps

There are 80Gbps enclosures in the way for Thunderbolt 5, but they will be so expensive I wouldn’t count on them being below the $200 at launch.

Professionals may wait for them if these deliver transfer rates over 5,000Mbps.

Until then, you will have to keep an eye on press releases from manufacturers and wait them in your retail store of choice.

NVMe Drives

Now that you have your enclosure, the next step is to bring your drive. Almost all decent drives nowadays can reach 3,700 MB/s, so your primary decision factor will be your budget.

$40 — 500GB

If $20 can make a big difference in your budget, then a 500GB may be the only choice for you. The Crucial P3 Plus 500GB is your best bet. Just be sure to check if there are 1TB drives on sale around this price, or if your retailers has coupons or rebates.

You could go lower for a Silicon Power 500GB that runs a 1,500MB/s for $30, but I would sincerely recommend borrowing $10 more.

Since this is the bottom of the barrel, don’t expect great performance. These drives are cool to pair with a 10Gbps enclosure and use it to save small files and other small, mundane things.

$60 — 1TB

This is the sweet spot on storage. Here the WD Blue SN580 1TB can be found around this price and it’s the best all-rounder for anyone looking for 1TB of data with some decent reliability.

A cheaper alternative should be the Crucial P3 Plus 1TB, and a very good alternative is the Samsung 990 EVO 1TB if you can find it close to this price.

Having a 20Gbps enclosure for these drives will do great for transferring large chunks of data back and forth. Otherwise, stay with the 10Gbps enclosure to save some money as you probably won’t note a big difference.

$120 — 2TB

At this price the needle moves a lot in terms of drives. A 2TB drive can be around this price, and the WD Black SN770 2TB seems like the most stable deal.

From here, the cheaper options are the WD Blue SN580 2TB and the Crucial P3 Plus 2TB. For the expensive options, the Samsung 990 EVO 2TB and WD Black SN850X 2TB.

Unless you’re putting these drives inside a 40Gbps enclosure, find drives that are good at random read/write performance instead, as these will already be bottlenecked by the enclosure. I’ll leave the comment surfing and review hunting to you.

$250 — 4TB

For the ultimate upgrade, 4TB of storage is the limit. Drives like the WD Blue SN5000 4TB, Crucial P3 Plus 4 TB, Corsair MP600 CORE XT 4 TB, Lexar NM790 4 TB, all will try to call for your wallet.

Because you’re spending a lot of storage, you may be also pushing a lot of data to and from the drive, so it would be logical to pair it with a 40Gbps enclosure.

Those mortals who don’t need this mount of storage should back down to a 2TB drive, or spending on a Mac Mini CPU or RAM upgrade instead in case you really need it.

Give me some combinations!

Those looking for a digestible and easy to understand list to buy, here is it:

$80 — Sabrent 10Gbps + WD Blue SN580 1TB
$160 — Sabrent 20Gbps + WD Black SN770 2TB
$200 — 40Gbps on sale for $70 + Samsung 990 EVO 2TB
$370 — OWC Express 1M2 40Gbps + WD Blue SN5000 4TB

Of course, you can mix and match anything, especially if you find a great deal on storage or on an expensive (and performant) enclosure.

People who are prone to fill their system drive the first day should look into moving your “Home” folder to the external drive, and hack-tape and glue that thing to your Mac Mini.