External drives would be based upon Thunderbolt 3 using USB-C compatible physical connections, and those are basically PCI-e 3.0 x4 lanes with a little external sync overhead. Samsung’s T5 drive would go along very well with these new minis. Obviously a drive hanging off a machine is less attractive / practical for business purposes but this is the usual Apple price / market segmentation model at work. Going back to user replaceable RAM is a bit of a shock to me considering other changes that are user-hostile (the T2 chip comes to mind).

Thanks

Any guess how much faster Apples SSDs would be than a T5 like this: ?

https://www.amazon.de/Samsung-MU-PA1T0B-EU-Portable-Kabel/dp...

I‘d expect an NVMe SSD to be about 5 times as fast as a traditional SSD like the T5, at least in theory. However as an owner of the T5 I can assure you it’s still very performant and ideal for large media storage. If peak performance is a real concern, you still have another option I just discovered: Samsung X5 - an external NVMe SSD: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/p...

This should be very close to internal PCI-based SSD performance and benchmarks seem to confirm this: https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/05/review-samsung-x5-thunderbolt...

So there‘s a storage upgrade path if you’re fine with external hardware. I‘m considering this solution myself.

Fantastic!

The new Apple SSDs in the Mac Mini 2018 are unknown so far but bets on being the latest Samsung and Toshiba NVMe SSDs for consumer class wear levels.

There’s a lot of small gotchas and caveats with Thunderbolt 3 and SSDs now but they are getting better slowly https://www.macworld.com/article/3276325/storage/nvme-over-t...

And let’s not forget that this is a 1st run product of a new generation and the Mac Mini 2019 may be significantly better in this area (or worse...)