Test: Expanding Mac mini M4 storage with the Beelink Mate Mini Dock (Thunderbolt 5)

That base price, however, comes with a huge caveat – on-board storage is a measly 256GB. And unlike some other computers, you can’t just upgrade that yourself. Purchasing the 512GB version from Apple would cost you $200/€250 more, which is a significant price jump for just 256GB on top.

Here’s where a storage dock for the Mac Mini comes into play – it not only expands the ports on the Mac Mini but also allows you to add SSD storage to the system, while also avoiding the messy look you get with dongles and external drives.

Today, we have one such dock from Beelink for test – it’s the aptly named, Mate mini. So what makes it stand out in the sea of available Mac mini docks?

The Mate mini dock

Well, for starters, the Mate mini from Beelink is Thunderbolt 5, meaning it has up to 80 Gbps of bandwidth, which elevates it above your dime-a-dozen 10Gbps docks on Amazon. The added bandwidth opens up the potential of the dock’s peripherals for your Mac mini – essentially, you have more bandwidth to run more things on it – an external monitor, external storage, etc.

The Beelink Mate mini comes in two configurations – the Mate mini A, which has two M.2 2280 PCIe slots with two lanes (x2) for a combined total of 16TB, or the Mate mini B, which has a single M.2 2280 PCIe slot with four lanes (x4) for up to 8TB.

The Mate mini A promises read and write speeds of up to 3,600MB/s and 3,400MB/s, and the Mate mini B of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively.

We have the model with two M.2 slots (A). At the time of this article, it costs $139 (without the SSD), $279 with a 2TB Crucial SSD, and $460 with a 4TB Crucial unit on Beelink’s website.

Ports – SD, 2x USB-A, Ethernet, 3.5mm, 2x USB-C

Let’s talk I/O. You have an SD 4.0 (UHS-II) card slot on the right with a max read speed of 312MB/s. At the front is a power indicator light. At the rear, there’s a USB-A 3.0 port (5Gbps), a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, another USB-A 3.0 port, a 3.5mm audio jack, a Thunderbolt 5 USB-C port (80Gbps), and another USB-C that’s only used for the power supply. This last one is used when you’ve connected peripherals that exceed 15W of power.

There’s an active cooling fan built into the Mate mini and a heat sink. During our testing, we can’t say we ever heard the fan working – it’s whisper quiet.

A perfect match for the Mac mini

Beelink ships two Thunderbolt 5-compliant USB-C to USB-C cables specifically designed to connect the Mate mini to the Mac mini. One is to connect the dock when placed under the Mac mini, and the other is when you have the desktop below the dock. There are handy instructions on the cables to avoid confusion.

Can go on the bottom, or on the top

To install an M.2 SSD you’ll need to open up the Mate mini dock. You’ll need some basic electronic tools for that, but any €10 toolkit on Amazon will do the trick.

First, remove the stick-on rubber feet. There are two Phillips head screws underneath; remove those and you’re in.

Then, there are another four screws you need to undo to gain access to the two SSD slots. Each SSD slot has its own tiny screw to fix the SSD in place.

Opening up the Beelink Mate mini

We’ve had this 500GB Samsung 970 EVO PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 SSD for a while and have been using it as an external drive for the Mac Mini in a USB-C enclosure. But now that we have the Beelink Mate mini dock, we wanted to use it inside the dock for a cleaner look, and this gave us an opportunity to see if it’s faster that way.

The PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 SSD is capable of 3,400/2,500 MB/s read/write speeds but was bottlenecked by the USB 3.2 enclosure, which was only 5Gbps. Putting the SSD into the up to 80Gbps dock should make it a bit faster.

And indeed, if you look at our before and after testing, the 970 EVO has a significantly higher read speed when tested inside the dock. It’s nearly 40% faster. Writing and reading H.265 4K video, which is what this SSD is mostly used for, is around 40% faster as well.

You could probably get even higher speeds with the Mate mini B, which has a single M.2 2280 PCIe slot with four lanes (x4). However, any storage upgrade from there would require replacing the SSD with a new one, rather than merely adding a second one. So you lose a bit of practicality for potentially higher storage speeds.

Left – SSD in USB enclosure; Right – SSD inside the dock

The other benefit of using the SSD in an actively cooled dock instead of a USB-C enclosure is sustained performance. The SSD could get really hot inside the enclosure under prolonged load. Here, we’ll have the peace of mind of knowing it’s being cooled properly.

Verdict

The Beelink Mate mini seems like a great match for the Mac Mini design-wise. It not only allows you to expand the available storage flexibly, but it also adds several ports to the system and even a card reader.

Since Apple would charge you $200/€250 for the 512GB version of the Mac Mini, it seems that the smart move is just to get the base version and upgrade the storage via a dock like this one, so it’s a purchase well worth recommending.

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