Which Mac Mini is faster?

bay243 wrote:

Hi. In the near future I’m considering purchasing a Mac Mini.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about how the 256gb drives are much slower than 512gb versions and I fully understand the why’s about this so won’t go into it.

I should also state the most intensive tasks I’ll be using it for will be photo editing in Photoshop.

First, if you are looking at reports that say the 256GB SSD is slower than the 512GB SSDm while they may be correct in fact you won't see much practical difference unless you are doing truly disk-intensive work, which photo editing is not. Keep in mind, these are SSDs, not 5400rpm notebook drives.

If Photoshop is your main app and your "most intensive task" is photoediting then by all means lean toward more RAM. 16GB minimum, 24GB better ... especially since you cannot upgrade RAM after purchase.

I have used Photoshop for many years on many different Macs, beginning with CS6 on Intel C2D models and now on CC2024 on an Intel i9. All had internal 7200rpm HDDs except for my newest iMac that has an SSD. Most of my images are 12-24MB and I have often worked on 100MB+ images with multiple base layers & adjustment layers. (I do photo restorations.) I have never felt constrained by the CPU or disk performance. But with Photosop, RAM makes a big difference.

An M2 Mac mini w/16GB RAM & 512GB SSD would be perfectly fine for photo editing. 24GB RAM would be even better in the long term.

bay243 wrote:

....

I should also state the most intensive tasks I’ll be using it for will be photo editing in Photoshop.

With Photoshop and most other Adobe apps the word is RAM, RAM, and more RAM. Get as much RAM as you can afford for these apps. Personally, after using Photoshop for many years, I would say 16GB is the minimum one should get with 24 GB or more strongly suggested.

Also, personally, if I were to buy a new Mini for photographic use, I would get the Mini Pro model. With nearly double the GPU cores processing images and double the memory bandwidth, processing images would be much more efficient and faster than a base Mini. Lots of photo filters and renderings heavily leverage the GPU.

IMO at the level of performance of M2 Macs, any difference in performance between the the 256gb & 512gb SSDs will hardy be noticeable in real life ... unless you're doing video editing, in which case I'd go for a 1TB drive.

If you are budget constrained then go with more RAM and the smaller drive. If it were me, however, I would go for 24GB RAM & the 512GB drive. Consider it future-proofing a computer you would expect to use for the next 8-10 years.

I went for the basic bog-standard model for editing FCP X and DaVinci Resolve.

The speed of the SSD is a red-herring as the only time it is meaningful is when straight copying huge files from one place to another.

For pretty much everything else the speed limiting factor is the CPU and GPU

Regarding wearing out the SSD with memory swapping and general usage I have got round the problem by installing macOS on a cheap 1 TB USB 3.0 SSD and booting the mini from that.

The whole caboodle works perfectly and the internal SSD has got no wear whatsoever.

As for the fact that the external SSD is much slower, it has no effect on the normal speed of the computer for the reason mentioned above.

Geekbench tests and real world rendering and exporting from FCP X or DaVinci Resolve are all the same whether booting from the internal or external SSD.

This is my setup with the M2 being booted from the Crucial SSD (£60).

Mine has only 8 GB RAM and I have never needed any more when editing 1080p and 4K

Get more if you want but you won't need it and it will almost double the cost of the M2.

Hello.

I am new in this Mac mini community and I am very interested in your experiences with this machine. What type display do you have and how do you value it?

Thanks in advance

Hans