Old_Soul_Ronin wrote:
Looking to upgrade my 2014 iMac. The new generation iMac maxes out at 2TB of storage. If I go with the Mac Mini, I can get up to 8TB of storage but the cost is an extra $2400 for that storage. But I can purchase a OWC Mercury Elite Pro with 8TB of storage for only $299. Heck, I can get 20TB for only $499. Why the big difference in price?
Reason #1
You are comparing apples and oranges. New Macs use high-end solid-state drives (SSDs) for internal storage. The Mercury Elite Pro drives that you are talking about use old-fashioned mechanical hard drives (HDDs). HDD storage is, in general, cheaper per GB, and available in larger amounts – but much slower.
When the computer is doing a lot of jumping all over the disk – as it does when you turn it on – a SSD will slaughter a HDD. A HDD has to use motors to drag heads around, then wait for platters to spin until data is under the heads. A SSD doesn't. That's why just about any new computer worth its salt will use a SSD for its startup drive.
Even on sequential read/write performance – which is often less critical – SSDs are often faster.
Here's one review of the 24" M3 iMac.
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/apple-imac-2023
2 GB iMac SSD => 1074 megabytes per second. A 7200 rpm desktop hard drive might offer sequential read / write speeds that were only one-tenth of that.
Reason #2
Even given that Apple is providing you with very fast SSD storage, they are charging you a lot pretty much because they can.
