Unboxing and Demo of the OWC Mini Stack for Mac and Mac Mini

when the Mac Mini M1 came out with the Apple silicon chip I went out and bought one immediately and I love it, it's a fantastic desktop, unfortunately I bought the cheaper and lower end model which wasn't a great idea now that The memory can't be expanded, it's 8 gigs and that's fine, but it's not great, the problem for me is the storage. This thing came with 256 gigs of storage and frankly, that's not enough to sync my Dropbox. I had been using external drives but decided to buy something different. I bought this

mini

st from OWC.

stack

STX and I'm going to unbox it today for Gestalt, so in 2020 the Apple M1 or Apple Silicon processors came out and they're fantastic, I guess you probably know this, but essentially they're an Arm based system with um high performance cores and high cores. efficiency, there's basically four of each in the original M1 uh, they came out with this Mac Mini back then um, which is again a great desktop, it's got decent graphics performance, it's got really solid CPU performance, everything's great . about this except nothing is expandable, the memory is actually part of the processor and cannot be expanded in any way, not how the storage is also soldered to the motherboard, you can't just open it up and add a drive like you used to.

Now, for a long time, what I was doing was just using external drives, so for example, this is a 500 size portable SSD, you know, it's USB 3, so I bought a cable that has native USBC on one end and USB. uh B3 on the other end um the problem is that these things suck, they're not that fast um another big problem is that it doesn't actually mount these external drives very quickly on boot, which means I'm trying to put my Dropbox here and , often, in fact, most of the time, when you start Mac OS, Dropbox doesn't work because the drive hasn't started yet and can't find its location, so you have to quit Dropbox and restart Dropbox, the other problem is that external drives, frankly, don't provide much performance, necessarily, you also know that they can move, they can move, you know that the cat can step on them and then things can't. work so an external drive isn't such a good idea what I wanted was the ability to expand storage on the Mac Mini now of course like I said you can't do that natively but remember Apple adopted Thunderbolt a few years ago , actually quite a while ago. years ago and Thunderbolt is incredibly magical.

Thunderbolt, if you don't know, it's not just USB, it's faster, it's actually USB, but better because each of these Thunderbolt ports actually have PCI Express and what does that mean, it means if you plug it in. something that's a lightning bolt, something instead of a USB, something that's faster but also more integrated with the system and that's really important because essentially what you get is the ability to expand these guys, even though they're not expandable, basically any Thunderbolt port like these USBC ports on the back of this Mac Mini is the equivalent of the PCI Express card slot that's inside a full size desktop computer, you can put video, you can put all kinds of stuff on this and so one of the cool gadgets out there and this is what we're going to unpack today is a dock, an external dock with multiport capability that's made to expand the storage and also the ports of this Mac Mini.

I really want to try it. this so let's take a look at this so this is the OWC U

mini

sters STX

stack

. I'm a big fan of out of this world computing aka Mac sales. We've bought a lot of things from them over the years. over the years and it's always great. because they focus specifically on the Mac market, so we have a lot of their bases. I also bought a bunch of cables and a bunch of random stuff. I even bought used Macs from them because it's a good deal, honestly this guy is really interesting because it's basically an STX storage and expandable Thunderbolt Hub expansion solution, well they call it a Thunderbolt Hub expansion solution but it What it really is is a lightning connected device, which means it is a PCI Express combo device.

Think of it now as almost a docking station for a Mac Mini. I think I should start by saying that this can really be used with anything that has Thunderbolt um Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 4, frankly with an adapter you could even plug it into an original Thunderbolt one device and it would work, but it's designed to be compatible with the Mac Mini, designed to sit below the Mac Mini, is the same size and is also designed to give the Mac Mini some of the things it doesn't have, notably a 3 full-size and 1 half hard drive. bay, a m.2 mvme ssse SSD bay and some additional ports including four more Thunderbolt ports which is kind of surprising so let's take a look inside the box here so inside we have the very simple owc instructions, we have the box.

Or cables um and power supply now, this is one thing I don't love about this solution and that is that it has a large external power supply, um, which is quite large. I mean, just for comparison, this is the Mac Mini and this is the power of owc. Mac minis now don't have an external power supply, they just have a cable, the power supply is built in and in fact if you open this box it's almost empty because Apple has miniaturized everything so well, but the OWC still uses this giant thing. Okay, I'll put it under the desk.

I will never look at it. Another thing that comes with this and this is really important. Surprisingly, it comes with a Thunderbolt 4 cable. Why is this important? Because Thunderbolt cables are very expensive. They're fragile, they're finicky and, um, a little guy like this, this could be a $40 or $50 cable if you didn't buy it with the base, which is kind of crazy, this whole package was under $300, um, the cables are really elegant. In order to carry the type of data that Thunderbolt carries, for comparison this cable can carry 240 watts of power and 40 gigabits of data and in fact the same cable will be used for USBC 5 and Thunderbolt 5 and will theoretically carry 120 gbits of data on that little guy, so no wonder it's so expensive, but it comes with a cable anyway.

Yes, thanks. Let's take a look at the base, so again, OWC has made several of these. um Mac Mini themed devices over the years um they are all designed to look a lot like a Mac Mini to be the exact size of a Mac Mini like they had one that was a hub and they had ones that were expansion based on USB, but this type is special because it is Thunderbolt, which means it connects with PCI Express and therefore you get full performance from the Mac Mini to the Thunderbolt device, so here on the back we have four Thunderbolt ports that can be used for entry or exit.

They also have powered Thunderbolt ports so you can connect power devices, that's one of the reasons it came with this giant speaker power supply because in theory you could put quite a bit of power into the end of this thing. This is a 180 watt power supply, so you could actually have all sorts of additional external devices that are bus powered and running at full speed. It also has a Kensington lock, which is great. Mac Mini doesn't have it and like I said, it looks like a Mac Mini. In terms of size now I don't love that it's black.

I bought the silver Mac mini. Even if you bought the space gray Mac Mini, it's not the right color. They used to be silver, but now they are black. Whatever. I also don't know exactly how I'm supposed to connect this. Do I want the ports to face me as the user or do I want them to face behind me? If I do, I'll have to fiddle and manipulate them with something else. What this thing is missing that I wish it had is an SD card slot. I have a Mac Studio desktop and it has an SD card slot on the front which is great.

It would also have been nice if it had a USB. port on the front again um so I don't have to worry about behind the machine, but these are the tissues um we can put it in there and as we can see it really is almost exactly the same size as the Mac Mini and it's a nice little stack , sort of a mini stack, you know, with storage and Thunderbolt expansion. Hey, that's what it's called. You know, looking back. We have this little cable is not very long, but it's probably long enough that you can. you could orient the thing or 90 degrees away, although I don't think you can do 180 degrees, so anyway, you know some options, let's take a look inside and see what we have for expansion inside this thing, oh, There's Tada. and it's open, so this is the inside of Minist's STX stack, as you can see, it's pretty empty inside, because there's not a lot going on here.

Basically the entire Minist STX stack is this circuit board here and this. extend uh Port plate right here is a fan um and that's it but that's all you need um so let's take a look at what we have here um we have an m.2 slot this is a 2280 slot that can handle um I think which is just PCI E3 but we'll correct that if I'm wrong uh We also have a SATA port here for hard drives, it's designed so you can use 2 and a half or 3 and half inch hard drives, which is great because not everyone still has the big and that's all.

Now I have some stunt devices here to show you how they fit together, so this is an old Seagate Barracuda 2TBte hard drive. drive um slide right there are some screws coming out from the bottom hold it in place um just to show you it also works with 2 and 1/2 inch hard drives you know this is an old Seagate uh 4 tbte um hard Drive there we go it works perfectly and um we also have a uh m.2 drive now this is a black Western Digital m.2 drive that we got from uh techfield day so thank you Western Digital um and as you can see it's a 2280 Drive so it fits perfectly here and it screws on, there's also a thermal pad here to dissipate heat from the m.2 and that's pretty much it, the idea is that you would essentially put in an m.2 drive. here, you may know, put a hard drive in here, plug it into the Mac Mini and it's as good as an attached internal storage device will be and then of course you can put other kinds of things in as well, so I've got The minist stack STX is up and running and connected to my Mac Mini and everything looks good so far, so I've noticed a couple of things about it, although first there's a bit of fan noise.

I guess that's to be expected, but it's a bit louder than the Mac Mini itself. Number two is that it looks like you can only connect it to one of the four Thunderbolt four ports on the back. It's the one with a little computer image next to it, who knew? Well number three is it's not as fast as you might think so I'm using a wd black um nvme SSD. It only has one X1 uh pcie link and it only runs at about 700 megabytes per second, read and write. good but not great, this is actually running on the internal drive and you can see that the internal drive on the Mac Mini, now remember this is the smallest one so it only has one chip, it's also a bit full , so it's Maybe not as fast as you'd expect but it's still working, 1600 megabytes per second ok and almost 3000 megabytes per second reading if I switch to the um nvme drive I installed again.

This is a wd black nvme drive so it should be pretty fast but I think what you'll see is that it's not as fast as we expected so let's try it, exactly 700 megabytes per second, the right speed and as it was wait, exactly 700 megabytes, actually 780 megabytes. read speed per second so what this tells me is that this is limited by the bus and again I think that's because it only uses a pcie LAN and that's basically all it can do; you're probably reserving the rest of the pcie bandwidth for the other expansion. ports and so on, but that being said, it's still fast enough to use as your Dropbox folder, your documents folder, compiling all that kind of stuff and the nice thing about it is that it's pcie, it's going to boot. very fast as soon as you start the machine, so if you move your Dropbox folder to it, it will just live there and everything will work fine.

The other thing, of course, is that you know you can connect external devices to this thing. Then I can plug in this USB SSD that I had been using as my Dropbox folder and it will just pop up and work. Overall, I would say this is a successful experiment. It definitely makes my Mac Mini a lot more useful, the fact that it's a generic Thunderbolt 4 device is also useful because let's say I don't want this Mac Mini anymore, you can use it on a regular MacBook, you can use it with the next generation Mac . Mini, you can use it with Apple Studio, you can use it with anything because honestly, it's just a generic device and it'll give you some hard drive space, um, m.2 SSD and a few more ports no matter what you're plugging into it.

In general,I would say this is a real life saver when it comes to those of us who bought the wrong Mac mini um and again for under $300 it's a pretty good value too thanks for watching we have more of these videos on YouTube just go to the Gestalt it video on YouTube. You'll see us doing some

unboxing

videos there, but of course you'll also see us doing what we normally do, which is covering the Enterprise it space news that we have on a weekly basis. uh news summary show, we also have two weekly podcasts that you will find there and of course you can learn more about us by going to gestal it.com