While you could have a faster external drive, it would be better to spend the money upgrading the internal drive, where possible.The specific question is impossible to answer because there are so many variables. If I bought an external Thunderbolt SSD for about £220 per terabyte, would I be likely to see any difference? DavidThe general question is easy: external drives are slower than comparable internal drives, because the interconnection itself adds an overhead. Apple can supply the unit with up to 2TB of solid state drive (SSD) storage, but charges an eye-watering £720 per terabyte.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.It also depends on what you are doing. 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.An external SSD’s real-world performance will also depend on many other factors, including the type of storage and the interface chips used.
Best External Hard Drive Video Editing Software And DataThe storage hierarchyExternal drives are the answer for adding more storage on the cheap to most laptops, but also desktops that are difficult to upgrade. 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. And you probably can’t do that…However, you should see a dramatic improvement whichever type of storage you choose. That will make far more difference to performance than picking a drive that looks “fast” because it’s good at sequential reads.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. However, if you need to do a lot of reads and writes, it’s better to choose an SSD that does those things quickly. Can you do sparklines in excel for mac 2008SATA II interfaces can handle up to 3Gbps ( gigabits per second) or 375MBps ( megabytes per second), while SATA III can manage 6Gbps or 750MBps.After that, there are external hard drives that use either USB (Universal Serial Bus) or Thunderbolt connections. There are fast flash memory cards that slot directly into the computer’s main board, and internal SSDs and hard drives that use Serial ATA connections. These storage systems are very cheap, very slow, and a very long way from the CPU.There are lots of options between these two extremes. At the other extreme, data that is rarely needed can be stored on tapes or Blu-ray discs that may take minutes or even hours to retrieve. In general, fast, expensive storage lives as close to the processor as possible, with the ultimate being cache memory that is actually on the CPU. The specifications always leave some headroom to allow for advances in technology, and sometimes they don’t leave enough. That doesn’t mean the drives are bad. A real-life throughput of around 2,750MBps makes it potentially faster than most internal SSDs, and not far short of the 1TB SSD in the 2018 Mac Mini.Note that the serial connection speeds, given in Gbps, represent the maximum bandwidth, not the actual throughput. Thunderbolt started at 10Gbps, with a throughput of 700MBps to 800MBps, and today’s Thunderbolt 3 is specified for up to 40Gbps or 5,000MBps of bandwidth. I own a similar WD MyBook, and while it’s comparatively slow, it has no problem playing 1080p full HD videos. You could move most or all of them to a cheap external hard drive.Today, you can buy an 8TB external USB 3.0 hard drive for £143.99, or £18 per terabyte. Data movesSo, the real question is how much data you need to move, and how fast you need to move it.Your operating system and programs should fit on the fast SSD inside the Mac Mini, where they will be instantly available, but what about the rest of your data? If you need 1TB for text files, photos, music, and videos, they don’t need to be stored on a high-priced internal SSD. ( M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs – yes, that’s a horrible mouthful – are currently the fastest internal SSDs.) Thunderbolt 3 can cope with all but the fastest of those. Thunderbolt 2 was fast enough to cope with multiple SSDs, but turned out to be a bottleneck for NVMe-based SSDs. We needed SATA III and USB 3.1 Gen 2 to cope with those. Apple does it because Thunderbolt 3 provides other functions as well.As Windows PC users will know, PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is the motherboard slot provided for fast graphics cards. This doesn’t mean you’re obliged to use external Thunderbolt 3 SSDs, because – as mentioned – the same port supports USB 3 Type C devices as well. Photograph: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesThe 2018 Mac Mini includes four Thunderbolt 3 ports, which are relatively rare on Windows PCs. If you won’t actually use the 2,750MBps that Thunderbolt 3 can deliver with a fast NVMe SSD, why pay for it? Why Thunderbolt 3?Thunderbolt 3 uses the same plug as USB-C but facilitates significantly faster connections. (I don’t have anything like that many, but if I did, they would fit on an 8TB drive.)Faster options include USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 SSDs (with Type C plugs that fit into Thunderbolt ports), SATA III SSDs (which fit into standard drive bays and external enclosures), and Thunderbolt SSDs.But as I said, you don’t need operating system speeds on a data drive. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set. Until it does, the Mac Mini is having to fill the gaping hole for an affordable Mac that doesn’t have a built-in screen.Have you got a question? Email it to article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through andMakes a purchase. Unfortunately, since the demise of the much-loved “cheese grater” or Power Mac G5, Apple hasn’t offered one. If you have four or more, Thunderbolt 3 is the way to go.It would, of course, be much more sensible to buy a proper tower with a couple of PCIe slots for graphics cards and room for multiple internal drives.
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