Mac mini M4 best 2tb for NVMe SSD

You are referring to an external drive, right?

Then try OWC (MacSales.com). They are considered the premier 3rd party hardware supplier for Macs. They have excellent customer support and stand behind their warranties 100%.

If you're not sure which of their numerous offerings to choose contact their Customer Support and give them your make and year Mac Mini, the system version you're running, your expected workflow and budgetary requirements. They will be be able to tell you which of their offerings bet suit your requirements.

OWC has bare NVMe drives also.

I'm guessing that you are talking about this hub.

Satechi – Mac Mini M4 Stand & Hub with SSD Enclosure

I would suggest paying attention to the information in the Important Info and Tech Specs sections concerning what SSDs you can install. If you scroll down further, there is a short Installation Instructions video which plays over and over, in a loop.

It looks like this hub connects to a M4 Mac mini via USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen 2), which means that maximum throughput to the SSD would be 10 Gb/s or 1250 MB/s before overhead, and competition for bandwidth from other devices.

Besides OWC, NVMe for external DIY enclosures/hubs I would suggest Samsung 980 Pro or 990 Pro. They have seemed to most reliable in my experience and generally more durable than less expensive alternatives. While the EVO series are less expensive, they aren't as durable and can sometimes be finicky in certain combinations with external enclosures and hubs.

In general, inexpensive NVMe SSDs don't seem to play well with Macs in my experience with the number of issues I have seen here and in other forums.

Because the dock only supports the USB3 speeds I would not spend too much on the fastest NVME drives like the Samsung 990 Pro. You can use a slower NVME drive like the WD blue series if Satechi supports that drive.

I agree with tbirdvet that spending big bucks for an NVMe to go in that hub would be a waste.

Those hubs look attractive at first glance as they appear to contain "everything" in a neat package but they do have disadvantages (as mentioned earlier) and are pretty pricey.

My solution was a 7 port powered USB 3.0 hub (£25) and a 2TB Sandisk NVMe (£85) with a £15 USB-C caddy.

FWIW, my suggestion of the Samsung 990 Pro was more from the stand point of durability. As an example, you cited the WD Blue series. A 2TB WD Blue has a rated TBW of 500TB. A 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro has a rated 1200 TBW.

In general use does the difference really matter, likely not. But it is some food for thought especially if the drive is being written to a lot on a daily basis.

For something like archive storage, then the TBW difference really does not matter then price is more of a driving issue. Then again, for archiving, you don't need tremendous speed and even cheaper HDD spinners are more desirable.

Maybe not spend big bucks – but the drive must be a M.2 NVMe one, not a M.2 SATA one.

The Satechi site makes that clear: "Incompatible with SATA M.2 SSDs."

Agree