Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Multiple reports that it is user-upgradable, like the earliest Mac mini’s. Here is one:
https://www.macobserver.com/tips/qui...pgradable-ram/
Storage is not replaceable. I’m still trying to understand relative performance of on board storage vs Thunderbolt 3 connected storage. For some reason I cannot seem to find this. If difference is negligible, then one could get less SSD onboard and just add it later as needed via Thunderbolt. I think the bottleneck is not transfer speed of TB3 (which is fast enough to replace and augment computing power via eGPU) but the speed of the storage itself, but would like to confirm it. If SSD gets faster in future, then maybe you even boot from external storage.
This would not be a corner to cut with a laptop but since mini is presumably sitting in a fixed location it seems one way to defer spending money. |
People already boot from external storage.
I use an external raid drive (drobo) on my iMac for most of my media (iTunes and Calbre) and never have noticed any real delay. You just need to make sure you use a different drive for your backups since time machine can drag disk performance down quite a bit while it's backing up. I use two raid drives, which is a bit expensive, but is much better from a reliability and speed point of view.
If I were to use a mac-mini as a primary desktop, I would likely max out the RAM, get the base SSD hard drive and get a nice raid external hard drive.
I would use a different strategy for a laptop.