Mac Mini M4 upgrade NVMe disk after purchase, Can I

1) The SSD of the Mac mini is not upgradable after purchase. Order the storage that you might need in the foreseeable future. Of course, you can always add external storage along the way.

2) The M4 base mini can support 8K resolution at 60Hz via Thunderbolt or HDMI, but limited to two displays in that configuration.

Mac mini - Technical Specifications - Apple

Apple provides no guidance on replacing the NVMe of any Mac mini, or in any M series Mac at all.

Apple doesn't condone modification of the M series computers and doing something like this is certain to void any warranty that your Mac may carry.

Unsanctioned modifications cannot be discussed in these Communities as that violates the terms of use.

Neither Apple nor any Apple Authorized Service Provider will upgrade the storage capacity of the M series Macs after purchase.

1) Nope' none of the new Silicone Mac mini's are not upgradable.

If you have the 256GB model, you can move and store your large Media Libraries on an External Drive.

see > Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

and > Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support

and > Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support

and > Move a Final Cut Pro library - Apple Support

If you do move any of your Media Libraries, it is wise to use at least two external drives.

One drive for the Libraries and one drive to backup the Mac and Libraries.

2) In addition to the Mac mini spec's that D.I. Johnson posted,

also see > Connect a display to Mac mini - Apple Support

Yes, it can be done by someone super qualified, however any modification will immediately invalidate the warranty and very possibly ruin the machine. So if you don't mind ruining the machine and invalidating the warranty and feel you are qualified to make the modification go for it. It's your money and time so you can do with it what you please.

Macs made for the past 5-10 years have not been intended to be user upgradeable. If you need more storage than the base 256GB then it would be wise to buy the machine pre-configured with it or buy an external SSD.

As others have said it is madness to contemplate modifying the M4 mini.

What you can do is buy a 1 TB Crucial NVMe for £60 and a Thunderbolt enclosure for £70 - £100.

You then have 2 options.

You can use the Thunderbolt drive as a normal external drive or you can install Sequoia on it and use it as the boot drive.

I use the second alternative as it preserves your tiny internal drive and all the wear and tear takes place on the external.

Although I now have a Thunderbolt drive doing this, for the past year I was using a cheap £7 USB 3.0 enclosure to run my M2 mini and surprisingly it was just as fast as using the internal.

So why did I move onto the Thunderbolt? Just to see what I was missing in performance and the answer is, "Very little!"

Doing what I suggest is extremely simple, quite cheap (compared with Apple's £400 for 1 TB) and does not invalidate your warranty when you destroy your computer!

lsepolis123 wrote:

You say SSD NVMe is not upgradable, but well here:

Note: Although the chips are replaced in this video rather than the whole NVMe, I think NVMe is upgradable as it can be removed from the Mac Mini M4 Motherboard... Well?

It is not upgradable in any practical sense.

Like other Apple Silicon Macs, and like Intel-based Macs with T2 security chips, the M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis do not use standard M.2 SSDs. The Apple Silicon chip (M4 or M4 Pro) contains the SSD controller, and what's on the circuit board is raw flash storage. The M4 or M4 Pro chip will be encrypting and decrypting most of the contents of the flash storage in real time. Even If you could buy a replacement board, you would need the help of another Mac to reset the one that you operated on after the upgrade. Without this reset, the upgraded computer would be an unusable "brick."

The only Apple Silicon Macs for which Apple sells "retail" SSD upgrade kits are the M2 Ultra Mac Pros. One of the kits for those will set you back $1000 USD for 2 TB, $1600 USD for 4 TB, or $2800 USD for 8 TB. (That is just for the parts and does not include installation.)

Apple 4TB SSD Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro

Maybe you could order similar parts for Mac Studios and M4 Mac minis via Apple's Self Service Repair Program – but at those prices, I bet your interest in doing so would evaporate quickly.

Either order your Mac mini with more internal SSD storage, or plan on using external SSDs.

The whole process is simple.

You format the drive to APFS using Disk Utility . . . that takes less than a minute, then download and install Sequoia on it.

Finally open System Settings/General/Startup Disk and choose your new disk.

As you can see from the screenshot I have 3 possible disks. The one just visible to the right is the old USB 3.0.

I bought a Gigimundo for £71 that works perfectly with my Crucial P3 Plus NVMe (£60).

Yes but do not use USB sticks to boot from as they are slow and unreliable.

Use an SSD or NVMe in a USB 3.0 enclosure.

As mentioned, I was using a USB 3.0 SSD running Sonoma for the last year and the performance was virtually identical to the internal SSD. The whole lot (1 TB SSD and enclosure) cost around £60 from Amazon.

I have a Mac Mini M4. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the internal data then opened up recovery and installed 15.1 on the external. It is fully bootable. I always use a WD Black NVME drive in a Thunderbolt enclosure for fastest speed.

You could but there is no need. If you set the external SSD as the boot drive and then forget to connect it the computer will restart from the internal drive by default. Remember Mac OS is not MS Windows, they are different in the their designs and history. Mac OS tends to be a bit more sophisticated, Windows will do mostly what you want but getting there is much trickier for the unsophisticated.