Adding Ports and Storage to the M1 Mac Mini

so a little while back i did a video talking about how i bought two different mac minis a base model and an upgraded model and i talked about the benefits the disadvantages and things like that and that video very quickly exploded and became the most popular video on my channel but also just a generally well viewed tech video and i was floored by this i was super happy with how that video came out however with that video doing as well as it did i started getting a lot of emails through my business email from companies asking if they could send me a product for me to review it and i usually turn these videos down because generally what they want is either a positive review no matter what or they want to send me a product that either has nothing to do with anything i do on my channel or just a product i'm really not interested in reviewing like a keyboard or a mouse however one company emailed me about a product that i had actually already bought a similar version to and was happy with but still kind of disappointed with and this product was something that i figured would be a good option for fixing the two main issues i had with the mac mini which was storage and port selection when quizlabs offered to send me their usbc hub with a hard drive enclosure i said yes now in the spirit of full disclosure this product was sent to me by quizlabs that's what made this video possible however they are seeing this video right alongside you i didn't give them any previews no copy approval nothing like that and they were even all right with a comparison video but i straight up told him like i don't do paid or positive guarantee reviews like this is going to be good bad ugly the whole deal and they were all right with that so credit where it's due thanks for sending me this thanks for not limiting what i can say about this one of the reasons why i said yes so anyway with that being said you're about to watch my genuine thoughts on this product not a paid promotion so with that out of the way let's get started so starting out with the unboxing you have a pretty general unboxing a little instruction manual the accessory itself two usbc cables one for power and one for usbc connection to the mac which we'll talk about the power one in a minute and then a screwdriver to get to the drive enclosure at the bottom now one thing i'll say here is i do like to see more recyclable packaging and most of this box is completely recyclable cardboard but the product was wrapped in plastic i know that that's a pretty common practice but i would like to see something more like what apple does where it's wrapped in paper that so everything can just be recycled you know what i mean but i know that's just a personal thing i'm not holding it against them because a lot of companies do it but once it's out of the box we have one thing that i was expecting to see that i didn't see which was a power brick because this is a powered accessory considering you are running two drives and a lot of ports now the good news is it can be run off something as basic as a little five watt charger like apple's power brick here or i'm actually running mine off of one of the usb ports on a power strip so you can run it off of pretty much anything but it would have been nice to include a basic spec matched power brick but you know the fact that these are lying around everywhere in a lot of people's homes if you own a smartphone i don't think it's the biggest deal i actually even tried powering it off the mac mini itself and it worked pretty well so i guess it's not a big deal now on the aesthetic side of the device it basically looks like it's meant for the mac mini you've got a silver base that is the exact same size as the mac mini you just put the mac mini on top it adds a bit of vertical space but there's no horizontal space taken up which is great because adding ports to a device usually falls on a dock to do and a dock usually sits alongside the mac mini taking up more space on your desk and for my tastes i personally hate that so being able to actually take up less space and just raise the mac mini off the desk a little bit i'm totally fine with now i mentioned that the issues i had with the mac mini were storage and port selection now we're going to start with port selection because it's the easiest to talk about and the mac mini's port selection in my original video i said was not a big deal but the more i used it the more i found out that it really kind of was a big deal as somebody who's more of a power user i would kill for more usb ports both the a and c variety because one of my usb-c ports is constantly used up running one of my two monitors and when i've tried adapters that give me video and more ports it always steps the video down in resolution which i don't want so one of those ports is always video when it comes to the usb a ports i run a mass storage drive connected directly to the mac so that there's less chance of it dropping out and i get full speed and then i have a usb a hub that i put on the floor because i hate taking up space on my desk and that runs a few other things like the dongle for my keyboard and my audio interface and really that leaves me with one useful port which is a single usb-c port now it's thunderbolt 4 capable as well but this is not a thunderbolt 4 accessory so you are limited to the max speed of current usb-c connectivity but that still means that you can run quite a number of ports off of it and well these guys did exactly that so around front of this device you have two usb 3.0 ports and one usb 3.1 gen 2 port both in the usb a variety and then two sd card slots one micro and one full size this is probably my favorite feature because up until now i've been reaching around back of my monitor and my mac and plugging this in it's got to the point where i was almost tempted to just spin the mac around and deal with having a bunch of ports run over the top but now i have everything i need right up front so i can just get rid of that could have made a more graceful throw but we'll keep that take instead and then just next to those is another usb 3.1 port but it's usb type-c so i can run devices like my t5 drives at full speed right out of that but there's a caveat usb 3.1 in either generation is easily capable of fully saturating the connection running into the back of the mac mini that means that if you're running a 3.1 device like my t5 drive at full speed and then connect another accessory you can actually watch the speed of your 3.1 devices drop slightly and that's because it has to make space in the bandwidth lineup to actually allow other devices to talk to the mac mini this isn't a huge deal because you're not normally running a 3.1 device at full whack all the time it's usually in little bits here and there the only times i noticed it was in high speed data transfers and usually in reading sd cards i don't know why specifically sd cards really did this but it didn't happen if i was just transferring an sd card or just transferring a drive with a bunch of data but if i was doing both at the same time you would watch the speeds dip in both cases again not a huge deal because most people aren't really fully saturating a connection and most of the time when i saw it it was just for testing so i would say that that's not a huge trade-off especially considering that one connection around back has given you all these ports and they're right up front which in my opinion is how apple should have done it from the start but we know how apple is now next to all these ports are three lights one is just a power indicator just letting you know that the device is on and connected but the other two are status lights for what's inside of this hub and this is honestly what i was most excited for because while apple's storage is good and very fast it is also very expensive and non-upgradable once you buy it in this mac mini i personally opted for gigabytes of storage because i figured i would put all my apps and temporary files on the main storage drive and then rely on external storage for any other files i might need however with the port limits that i mentioned earlier that quickly became a bigger issue than i thought having to pick and choose which drives you want and having to reach around behind the mac to unplug and change the drives whenever you wanted a different one was a massive hassle i would rather have something that was just always there always connected and well this answers that now having a two and a half inch drive enclosure isn't anything super special in my opinion in fact the cheaper dock that i bought also has a two and a half inch driving closure and i put a solid state drive in that i put a solid state drive in this however what i was more excited for was the nvme enclosure yeah that's right you can actually put a full pcie gen 3 nvme drive into this i bought a one terabyte sandisk one and slapped it in immediately and the install is actually really easy they use this rubber grommet instead of a screw like other manufacturers so you just line it up and pop the grommet in and you're done now i haven't tested this with a heat sink yet mainly because there were no heat sinks available in my local best buy and by the time i did this video i completely forgot to buy one if i'm totally honest but so far the drive's been fine i haven't felt any sort of crazy heat coming off of it so that's a plus and even if that was the case there's not a whole lot of air flow so whether or not you had a heat sink i haven't had any issues but your mileage may vary now for my specific setup i went with a two terabyte qvo ssd through the sata connection port in the two and a half inch drive bay and i did this because that drive holds things like my top five videos my reaction videos and anime based content i do those more frequently and i don't have my camera settings cranked for those videos so i didn't need a crazy amount of speed and i just needed more storage and reliability and for that it works fine you get full sata connection speeds out of this thing and editing off of it is a treat so with all my anime content going on to the two terabyte drive i use the nvme drive the one terabyte for all my tech videos and the reason for this is because the nvme theoretically should be faster up to two gigabits per second for the one that i bought and when i do any of my tech videos i crank the settings on my camera so that i get the best image quality and have the most options for changing settings later and adjusting color and i figured throwing an nvme drive in this thing would be the easiest way to fix that and i can basically just edit off of it no issues were good however this is where i came across my biggest disappointment for this accessory which is that the nvme drive doesn't run anywhere near full speed this samsung ssd should be able to run at upwards of two gigabits per second theoretical and i actually took this drive out and put it into a pc and ran the same tests and i got the advertised speeds inside this though the speeds i get are closer to a sata connection not bad but definitely nowhere near what i was actually expecting which is really disappointing i don't know if they limited this due to the controller in the accessory not being fast enough or the cable in the back not being fast enough i really don't know because when i took the ssd out the two terabyte one and ran just the one terabyte nvme i still got the same speed so it's not like the bandwidth from both drives is limiting one so basically the way i see it is even though i have two separate drives dedicated to do different types of videos i basically just added three terabytes of sata speed ssd to the device it's a bit of a letdown and i do really wish that the nvme drive could run faster you know really stretch its legs but i guess maybe that's why i'm not having any heating issues is because it just doesn't run fast enough to cause them at the end of the day that is probably the biggest letdown for me with this device and i've still yet to find a perfect dock with a driving closure and ports around front that can be added to the mac mini but i will say this came damn close it fixed the usb problem which was that i usually only saw ones with usb 2 and a handful of usb 3s all usb 3 sign me up and the fact that i do now have two drives as opposed to one is great but the fact that both the more expensive one with the nvme drive and the less expensive and theoretically supposed to be slower drive of the sata connection are the same speeds that sucks um before we move on the only other thing that i want to mention but i don't know if it's the m1's fault or the hub's fault is that when i plug in any other form of storage whether it be out of my toaster or an external ssd or whatever as soon as the mac mini goes to sleep it disconnects all the drives it doesn't do this when i don't have another storage device connected but again i don't know if this is something to do with the mac mini or the hub but i figured it was worth a mention but overall i'm still glad that quizlab sent me this product for a couple reasons the biggest ones being it really streamlined my workflow being able to take my sd card right out of my camera slap it in and transfer it right up front without having to flip it around or plug in an accessory is awesome and the fact that i can still add storage is great and generally it's cheaper to buy multiple drives of varying storages versus just buying one massive drive especially if you're going solid state so that's a plus but the downsides of having the port speed limitations if you're running more than one full speed device up front is a bit of a letdown and the biggest letdown is of course the nvme drives and my suggestion with that is if you're gonna put an nvme drive into this device save the money don't buy a pcie one buy a sata based nvme ssd that will be probably a little less painful because those will run at the speeds you would expect versus expecting two gigabytes and only getting 670 megabits so after all that's been said you and quiz labs if they're watching are probably asking do i recommend this product and my answer is yes i do still recommend this product i've yet to find the perfect expansion accessory for the mac mini there's always some caveat but the caveats that this makes aren't the biggest in the world and for that i think it's a little bit closer to a perfect expansion accessory way better than what i've seen from any other competition and definitely a league above what i actually bought myself so again links in the description go check it out and also side note full credit to whoever filmed the video on your website in hdr and posted it because i got blinded by like a little side video which was hilarious whoever filmed that in hdr i appreciate your effort but either way that's been it thank you guys so much for watching this video i hope you guys enjoyed it last tech video for a while i promise we're gonna move back to top fives guess the animes and some reviews but for now that's it thanks for watching and i'll see you all in the next video make sure to be there and have a good one [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Garrett Crespo

Views: 53,325

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Id: qCZnqLU3pkU

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021