Blackmagic Forum

After watching many youtube videos, I have decided to go from my aging i7 system to the Mac Mini M4, base model with a fast external 2 Tb thunderbolt 4 drive which various YouTubers have said will be about as fast as apple internal storage. A couple of people have suggested moving the home folder location to the external drive (not booting from it). I was thinking of doing that and then installing Resolve Studio. I wonder if anyone has any advice on that.
On my windows computer I have my software, scratch files, input and output media on different HDs. Is this necessary on the M4? If so, should I be buying some cheaper, slower external drives for some of that?
Grateful for any thoughts. Thanks.

If you don't have dozens of long projects you use at the same time, I'd keep the Library on the internal SSD.
You can easily wreck your Library if it's on an external one and you forget to connect that before starting DR. Everything else, like caches, proxies, media, whatever can reside on an external one (or several). If you don't need to work with heavy multicam or uncompressed ArriRAW, you don't even need a Thunderbolt SSD. I have one, which measures faster, but in daily use I hardly feel a difference against a regular Samsung T7 (which is not even recommended for cameras). Two external drives are an advantage when you are separating cache and media or if you run long encodes from one to the other. But even that doesn't show by a huge margin.

The base SSD in the mini is pretty small, but if you keep your system tidy and don't let too much stuff hang around on the desktop or in the download folder (which you could redirect to an external), it will suffice.
I have 'only' 512 GB in my laptop and I have literally over 100 programs on it, including some pretty hungry ones, like AI with downloaded models. I can still live quite well with this after 3 years.

According to some guys on YT, a fast external SSD can be outpace the internal of the base model. But for reliability, I'd either glue that to the mini (looking ugly), or keep system, DR and the Library internal.

Finally, who knows if there's no third party showing up with replacement SSDs for the mini.

A year ago I bought the base model M2 mini with 256 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM.

Because of the tiny SSD I decided to buy a 1 TB Crucial SSD and a USB 3.0 enclosure for around £60 and boot the whole machine from that to see how it worked. As the Crucial was less than a 20% the speed of the internal I wasn't expecting much.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Geekbench tests with the external and internal gave virtually identical results . . . within 1%.

I know that bench tests aren't the same as real-world computer use and editing so I tested both drives with FCP and DVR projects.

Subjectively they seemed identical but what would they be like when tested objectively. So I did a number of rendering and exporting tests.

The Crucial did take longer but it was less than 4% which I consider to be negligible . . . let's face it, that means an hour long export would take 62 minutes. - hardly a cause for concern!

In fact the only time the Crucial's speed was noticeable was when copying massive files but that is something I almost never do.

I must lay my cards on the table and state that I am NOT a busy professional stressing my computer all day long with a massive workload whilst having several apps and 40 tabs of Chrome open at the same time!

Maybe for them something more powerful would be called for.

So the M4 mini with a more powerful processor and double the RAM of my M2 should really fly.

PS. A couple of weeks ago I decided to fork out £130 for a Crucial P3 1 TB NVMe and a Thunderbolt enclosure.

It's a tad faster, like 4% (same as the internal) but has it made a big difference . . . no!

On my humble setup running from the USB 3.0 SSD I could play back 7 tracks of 4K PIP with colour correction without dropping frames.

Here's a one minute video I made which shows how slick the machine is and remember I was also recording the desktop with Screenflow.

Keeping system and the DR Library on an external boot disk is a viable alternative for sure, simply because you can't forget to connect it. I do that all the time for tests with 'sandboxed' OS and DR beta versions.
I was referring to the trouble you can get when you boot from the internal one, but have the Library on an external one.
And then, all folks working with highly compressed formats like H.264 and 265 will see much more influence from the hardware decoders than from storage speed, since those data rates are really low for modern SSDs.
Data throughput will play a bigger role when you deal with professional I-frame only formats with very high resolution and less compression.

Thank you very much Uli and Ian for some very solid information. I've watched several YouTube videos including useful ones from Alex Tech and a detailed one which appeared yesterday on copying the Home folder from the internal to an external drive.

I’ve read that the problem with booting from an external drive seems to be that it breaks Apple Intelligence and Apple Pay.
I’m still making up my mind while waiting for my Thunderbolt drive to arrive. In the meantime I’m using my old exfat and NFTS USB 3 drives through a £15 UGREEN 6 in 1 USC-C Hub. I haven’t installed DaVinci Resolve yet.

Well, let's see what Apple Intelligence means beyond being a company that's making good money
ApplePay wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. Even if it's true it won't work, there are enough alternatives.

Regarding your drives: don't use exFAT. It was never really great and it means asking for trouble under Sequoia. Moving back and forth between the systems, use NFTS or APFS. Both are mature file systems, and Paragon is offering transparent solutions to work with these on either system.

Thank you again Uli, I formatted the external drive to NFTS but, for better or more realistically worse, I decided to try to install my home folder on it. I then got into difficulties which I eventually 'solved' by a system reset. I think the problems might have been caused by my Ugreen disk periodically ejecting itself ..possibly the Ugreen cable is faulty. The ejections occurred even though the external disk and mini M4 were on a flat surface and I had straightened out the rather inflexible cable so that there was no strain on the USB ports. Currently awaiting a response from Ugreen.