Which USB hub for the M1 Mac mini? | Satechi vs AGPTEK | Mark Ellis Reviews

i love the m1 mac mini it's now my daily driver it does all of my production work but it has one issue which is the lack of ports but i've been testing two hubs that solve this issue and i've got one clear winner welcome back to marketers reviews and thank you as always for subscribing if you haven't subscribed just click below now if you watch this channel at all you'll know that i love the m1 mac mini it's superb it's changed the game for me but it has one issue which is the lack of ports now for the uninitiated you get two usbc ports or thunderbolt ports and two usb a ports and that's it okay you get an ethernet port and what have you but that's a lot you don't get an sd card you don't get any more usb a ports no more usbc ports and it has less ports keep saying the word ports than the outgoing intel version it's not annoying for everyone and if you don't do a lot of content creation you don't perhaps have lots of external drives and things attached then it probably isn't a big deal for you actually and you can probably get away quite happily with those four ports but for people like me and having looked at the comments on my other videos it's a bit of a downer now there's two solutions to this one of them is that you attach lots of dongles hanging out the back of the mac mini not very elegant bit of a mess the second option is to get a hub stand i had no idea these existed until i got the mac mini but they do and i've picked out two which i think are great one is from a company called satechi and the other one is from a company called agp tech on the face of it they look quite similar but there's a couple of differences which will sway your buying decision one way or the other a very quick note on data transfer speed now if you know this channel you know that i don't dive deeply into specs and i don't really pay much attention to benchmarks like it olympic so i will tell you the data transfer speeds that these hubs offer but i won't get into the weeds of what that means for certain types of work simply because i don't think these usb hubs are designed for example to run video editing from if like me you're a video editor i wouldn't recommend attaching an external fast external ssd drive to one of these hubs to edit video i would still do that directly into the back of the mac mini or ideally editing off the mac mini's own built-in ssd the point of these hubs is to give you additional connectivity for data transfer really so whether it be perhaps an sd card that you need to put in there and transfer photos from or perhaps an external drive where you just need to copy some bits and pieces or it might even be a usb key that you need for a software license or something these hubs are fantastic for that but you will always get the fastest data transfer speeds either connecting a fast ssd directly to the back of the maca mini virus usb c thunderbolt ports or obviously the internal ssd in the mac mini now the satechi is the first mac mini hub that i tried it's 79.99 comes in two different colors obviously to colour match the mac mini and it gives you three usb a ports one usb c port and they're all five gigabits per second you also get a headphone jack on the front and you also get to my delight an sd card reader for both standard sd cards and micro sd cards now the best thing about the satechi really is the way it looks and the way it fits around your mac mini it's got this kind of ridge that your mac mini sits within and that means it's always perfectly aligned so you just place your mac mini on top of it done and the color match is great it looks to my eyes it looks identical to the silver mac mini that i have it's really well made and it just looks great for the money and it's almost like apple made it i mentioned this in my full review of it which i will link to above that it almost makes your mac mini look like a special edition and install wise it's about as simple as it gets it has a very short cable at the back which is permanently fixed to the satechi and that just goes into the back of your your mac mini easy now i know there's been some concern over ventilation with this hub and with these hubs in general because you are essentially placing your mac mini onto something which could potentially stop the airflow i've not experienced that issue at all i've used both of these hubs for extended periods of time done lots of heavy work on my mac and it doesn't matter mainly because that m1 is such an efficient chip i can't talk for the intel version if you're using these hubs for an intel mac mini then i don't know you might run into some thermal issues with it i don't think you will personally but it's worth doing a little bit more research on that but certainly if you have an m1 mac mini don't worry about the ventilation thing it's not going to damage your mac mini the mac mini does not get hot with that m1 chip but i really like the satechi it gives you those ports on the front it gives you a usbc port on the front and it's important to remember however that that isn't an additional usbc it's actually just an extension of one of the usbc's on the back of your mac mini now that can be a bit of a downside because as mentioned before the the transfer speed of the satechi's usb c port is nowhere near as fast as what you get directly at the back of the mac mini it's still quick don't get me wrong i've done fairly quick file transfers on it but it's yeah it's not the same thing and for some people losing that direct usb connection on the back of the mac mini which is obviously what this attention plugs into it's not ideal i think it's worth it if you just want quick access at the front of your mac mini for that usbc rather having to reach around the back and you don't mind losing some transfer speed it's great however if you really rely heavily on the transfer speed directly out the back of that usbc then it's probably not ideal to go for the satechi if you're not fussed about that it's a great option it's no frills it fits the mac mini fantastically it gives you that front loading sd card slot which is just a godsend from my perspective and although these ports aren't supposed to support charging they do charge stuff so i think satech you're probably just kind of covering the backs with that but i've charged my phone from it i've charged my earpods max i've charged all sorts of usbc devices which you're probably not supposed to so again i can't be held responsible if you plug them in and something goes wrong you do that at your own risk but it has charged things for me quite happily now the agp tech is also 79.99 if we look at the design first of all it's quite different to the satechi in that respect so whereas the satechi has that ridge into which your mac mini conveniently sits and very neatly and squarely sits you don't get that with the agp tech you just put your mac mini on top of it and it's up to you to line it up that's a bit annoying really it's one of those things where if you're pulling things out of the mac mini fairly regularly or pulling things out of the agp tech hub quite regularly you will misalign them i'm a little bit anal about that sort of stuff i want to see things nice and flourish and what have you so yeah the agp tech gets a bit of a thumbs down on that versus this attaching also when i bought mine i could not find the silver version it does exist 100 i will put a link in the description to this video but i had to get the think it's space gray black whatever it is and it looks a bit daft really it's like a two-tone mac mini i've got now that's my problem all that aside it's really well built it's a very well built piece of kit the one potential upside of not having that ridge into which the mac mini sits on the agb tech is that it might improve ventilation if you are worried about that if you have an intel mac for example this one does there's a gap there's a visible gap between the hub and the mac mini that might help ventilation potentially so in terms of ports on the agp tech again it's quite different to the satechi so you get four usb-a two of them are usb 3 at five gigabits per second and the other two are usb 2 at 480 megabits per second again not particularly quick particularly those usb 2 connections but they do the job for data transfer if that's all you need them for as i mentioned before perhaps you know software keys and things it's great for that and it also has again the sd card slots on the front for both standard sd and microsd there's no headphone jack unlike this attaching it doesn't bother me really i don't listen to music directly at the mac mini i use a headphone amp for that but if you do want to connect your headphones easily to your mac mini without putting them around the back then the satechi gives you that but you don't get the headphone jack with the agp deck and there's also no usbc port on the front it's all usb-a but again that doesn't really bother me because as mentioned earlier on the satechi that front-facing usb-c port is just an extension of one of the back usb-c ports on the mac mini and i found that i didn't really use that front-facing usb-c port on the citation at all so personally i'd actually rather have those usb a ports for me they're much more useful it's also worth mentioning that you can connect the agp tech to the back of the mac mini either via usb-a or via usb-c which is pretty handy actually because it means that you don't have to take up a usb-c port on the back the biggest difference between these two hubs though is that the agp tech has a hidden compartment and in that hidden compartment you can put a 2.5 inch ssd now in mind i've put a 2 terabyte crucial drive in there and it's fantastic it's immediately given me extra space on my mac mini without having to have a drive somewhere on the desk and it seems pretty quick again you're not going to get blistering transfer speeds for this but if you want a drive for perhaps time machine or your own personal backup or just somewhere to put other stuff i can't think of a better way to do that with the mac mini than insert it within this agp tech hub one thing to bear in mind with this however is the fact that mac os may disconnect that drive because it essentially sees it as an external drive so if your mac goes to sleep it might disconnect that drive within the atp tech hub now personally i don't let my mac go to sleep rightly or wrongly so that doesn't affect me at all but if you do there's a piece of software you can get actually that will solve this issue for you i'll link to that in the description now before i give you my conclusion as to which of these two hubs is my favorite i wanted to share a really awesome discovery i made recently now this video is very kindly sponsored by macpaw a superb software developer and they offer a service called set app and it's brilliant i genuinely couldn't believe this existed so for basically for 9.99 a month you get access to over 200 superb apps mainly for the mac but they you can add ios devices onto this plan as well for a little bit extra per month but yeah for 9.99 you get access to a whole suite of brilliant mac apps and it includes things like clean my mac x which i'm a massive fan of ulysses which i couldn't live without from my blog istat menus bartender ad guard clearvpn mars edit the list goes on and on and basically once you sign up you can install as many of these apps as you want there's no limitations to them no ads you can use them as long as you want to it's it's one of those services where you think why hasn't someone done this before the best thing is you can try it for free i think it's great value i think once you try it you'll probably want to continue but if you just want to give it a go head over to the link in the description and try out setup i really highly recommend it so which of these two mac mini hubs would i pick well for me it's really simple it's the agp tech and the main reason for that is that integrated ssd enclosure it's just so useful and also just the fact that the usb ports on the front are all usb-a i just used them i didn't i never used that usb-c port on the front of the satechi yes i wish it was the same color as my mac mini i wish it was properly attached to it in some way so i don't have to keep rearranging it but i can get over that so i think the decision for you on this comes down to whether or not you could make use of that internal drive bear in mind obviously that will increase the cost of this because you'll have to buy buy the ssd but it you know you'd have to spend too much money on that to be honest and immediately gives you more space on your mac mini however if you are more of an aesthetics person and you like the idea of having a hub which sits perfectly beneath your mac mini the satechi is unbeatable with that but the agp tech just feels like a better overall package now as much as i love the m1 mac mini i do appreciate that lots of people at the moment are trying to decide between that computer and the brand new 24-inch imac which also has an m1 chip in it so i've put together a little buying guide for this so if you're trying to decide between those two computers keep watching for a link to that video but in the meantime thanks as always for watching and i'll catch you next time

Channel: Mark Ellis Reviews

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Keywords: Mark Ellis Reviews, Mark Ellis, mac mini hub, m1 mac mini hub, mac mini hub ssd, mac mini, hagibis mac mini hub, satechi mac mini hub unboxing, satechi mac mini hub review, mac mini m1, satechi mac mini hub, mac mini accessories, m1 mac mini, best mac mini accessories, apple silicon mac mini, hub for mac mini, best mac mini hub, satechi mac mini, agptek, agptek hub, satechi, satechi hub, usb-c, satechi vs agptek, usb c hub, apple mac mini accessories

Id: NwOpLnYIH5s

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021