Can I expand the two Thunderbolt ports on a Mac Mini without breaking the bank?

There are, but none of them I can see maintain the speed or will power a monitor, so my RAID drive would go from 20Gbps to 5 and my USB C hard drive would drop as well. If you have seen otherwise, please let me know.

Thanks. Yeah, I saw the OWC one, but with a new purchase, I am weighing up the relative cost of Mac mini with having to buy a a more costly hub which starts to inch closer to the cost of a Mac Studio, but you get double the RAM and a faster computer with all the ports built in. I just find it hard to believe that there isn't a cheaper port solution. Frustrating the mini just doesn't have more ports. I would be buying the Studio essentially because of the ports. I suppose if I am forced to get the Studio, it may seem overpowered now, but it will ultimately serve me longer, but thought I would see if there was a cost effective solution. I USB C hard drive will suffer speed reduction if it isn't a full 10gb port.

The problem is that the hub will use one of the two TB ports, so then I only have on left, which I can use for my RAID drive, so then I would need two ports for my monitor and tablet. One can use HDMI and if the hub also has HDMI, then I guess I can use HDMI for both instead of USB C, so but is there any downside to HDMI for a 4K monitor compared to USB C? Oh, but I also have a Lacie drive which has USB C and USB 3.1. If I use the USB 3.1, I guess it's not as fast as the USB C plug. So complicated because Apple couldn't have squeezed in a few more ports!! I suppose the best option might be Woodmeister's suggestion above, unless my Lacie can get away without using USB C.

Kind of. If money is no object, I could get the Mac Studio, which would be about $1,300 more, but come with all the ports I need. It would be more powerful, but everything I have researched suggests that for my use, the M1 mini is really good. I do use Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, but The Studio is more for loads of uncompressed 4K multi cam type stuff which can really use that power, which I don't tend to do. My current Mac is a late 2013 iMac, which still runs pretty decent, so I imagine the M1 mini will be so much better.

We are late 2013 iMac brothers! My iMac was specced out at the time with top graphics i7 and 32gb RAM. I even replaced the HD with a 2TB SSD not too long ago. Interestingly, the read write speed on the SSD is about 400 mb/s compared to about 2400 mb/s on my internal SSD on my M1 MacBook Air, so obviously bus speed is the thing!

What's confusing me now is how I use my legacy external drives. I have a 6TB RAID 0 drive who's speed is about 180 mb/s, so waaaaaay slower than the internal SSD of an M1 Mac and about the same as a single external USB C HDD drive. So is an HDD RAID now essentially a pointless format compared to a simple USB C drive? That is, is there any advantage to RAID compared to just using USB C with normal single HDD?

This is a little off the original topic, but kind of related as it's about how I use my hard drives on the mew Mac. I got a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 converter, so I could use the Thunderbolt RAID drive, but confused about if RAID makes any sense now. 6TB of SSD would be too expensive, so what's the best way to use HDD drives on new Thunderbolt equipped Macs?