Making a Fusion Drive.įirstly I had to boot from the internet recovery partition. So imagine being able to make an Fusion drive with a fast and a slow SSD. Then files are copied between the SSD and the slower drive in the background. A fusion drive was designed by Apple to ‘fuse’ an SSD drive to a slower spinning drive to ‘speed it up.’ The writes are done to the SSD, and the most used files are kept on the SSD. It is so significant that this would be an ideal situation to make a fusion drive. The new Mac Minis are much faster, but I was interested in the speed difference between the internal SSD and external SSD. Here are the read speeds of various drive configurations measured with Black Magic disk test: It didn’t work! But I thought I ‘d write a post in case anyone else has the same idea. So I thought it might be an option to buy a Mac Mini with a small internal drive (256GB) and add an external SSD drive and combine them into a fusion drive. But these drives are super super expensive. I measured read times of 2500MB/s which is 5 times faster than the SSD drive in my old mac mini.

Looks like I’m answer to my original question is that I am not seeing anyone really say “I wish I had a bigger internal SSD and did not rely on external SSD drives”.The new Mac Minis have super fast SSD Drives. I still have time to change my order and go down in size to 1TB oR even go up in memory. When something is a gift for me to pick out, I still like to think of it as spending my own money, hence the decision to be made. I want to be sure the performance of working with 4k (and eventually 8k) videos externally would still be good performance through iMovie or in the event I go to Final Cut one day or Lightroom/Photoshop for my hobby. I am not opposed to moving the iMovie library (1TB) and the HVEC converted versions (400GB) to external SSD as I see the financial value in it. They aren’t archived as in never looked at anymore. I have about 4000+ clips and since I made them available me through the Apple TV and the videos are no longer trapped in iMovie on my iMac, they get watched way more than they ever have now. If I go the route of a smaller internal storage option and make the internal 1TB as opposed to 2TB and move my video work/library to external, I will need to keep the drive attached as the family watches the videos quite often through the Apple TV. Click to expand.Thanks for the replies from everyone.

Mac mini with external ssd