Expect to pat around $500 for 4 Gen 3, 1 TB NMVe drives. However, even a PCIe Gen 3 NMVe drive will be blazing fast. There are two PCIe levels Gen 3 and Gen 4.
The price of drives varies quite a bit depending on size and performance. The OWC Helios S3 / NMVe bundle costs $279. That will provide both a read and write speed increase as well as add data security in case of drive failure.įurthermore, if you already bought an M1 Mac with the 256 GB internal drive, this is your only option to increase your boot drive size. Speaking of redundancy and insurance, you can set up RAID 5 with the full OWC SoftRaid application on the four external drives. It also would free up a 156 GB partition for audio projects. IOW, you have boot drive redundancy which buys you a big level of insurance. And of course, if you boot off of an external drive, you could partition your internal 256 GB drive so it has a 100 GB partition for emergency boot up in case your external boot drive fails. The external drive is likely to be indistinguishable from the internal drive when it comes to performance.Īs the article suggests, having an external boot drive available can be a life saver if there is a problem preventing boot up from the internal drive. It too uses the PCIe bus to connect to the chip. Remember, the internal drive is not part of the M1 chip. Considering that TB is a PCIe bus, there may be no performance differences at all. With the read/write speed of NVMe drives, booting from an external drive is going to provide very close to (if not identical) performance as booting from the internal drive. There are a lot of advantages to this setup. You can buy additional 4 bay trays for $39.99. This system is a 4 bay NVMe storage tray that fits inside the included Helios S3 enclosure. Then I came upon this $279 solution from OWC: After a lot of research into drive speeds, I decided on an external NVMe drive enclosure so I could have extra space for audio projects and samples.
So I started to look at external drive options. I wasn't going to go with the 2 TB upgrade. The options for these upgrades are even more expensive on MacBook Pro. The upgrade to 512 GB on the M1 Macs costs $199. So I never dreamed that that option would be available just three months into the M1's life span. The option to boot from an external drive wasn't available until about 5 years ago. I got 10 years from my old iMac by booting off of an SSD in my external TB2 OWC Thunderbay Mini 4 bay enclosure. In my case, I'd decided to increase the internal storage to 1 TB to add some future proofing insurance.
When I started to evaluate the M1 Mini for my needs, I became convinced that the 512 GB internal drive would be the minimum required storage level. It potentially lowers the entry cost of the M1 for music creation.
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