Apple’s new M6 Mac Mini won’t feature the aftermarket upgradeable storage found in the M4 Mac Mini. Instead, the NAND chip (Yes, the single NAND chip) is soldered down to the logic board resulting in an anti-consumer focus. If you are in need of more storage for your Mac you will need to either buy an external hard drive, SSD, or NVMe drive and connect it to your limited USB-C/Thunderbolt ports or invest in a iCloud Paid plan, or third-party cloud storage provider such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Proton Drive, etc. to store your files.
Apple’s original M1, M2 and M2 Pro Mac Minis also had their NAND chips soldered down to the logic board. With the M4 and M4 Pro Mac Mini being the only M series Mac Mini to feature upgradable storage. With one trade off, upgrading the storage after buying the desktop will void your warranty and any issues you may have will not be covered by Apple Care.
As discovered by Macrumors, the base 256GB version will use a single 256GB NAND chip found in the M1 and M2 Mac Minis instead of two 128GB chips found in the M4 Mac Mini. This results in slower speeds compared to the M6 with 512GB but faster speeds than the M4 with 256GB, clocking in 3.2 GB/s reads and 3 GB/s write. Upgrading to the 512GB variant will result in a double of read and write speeds resulting in 6.3 GB/s reads and 6.5 GB/s writes.
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In my opinion the M6 256GB Mac Mini looks interesting, even though I bought the base M4 Mac Mini last year. But in recent weeks I’ve been taking up video editing in 4K with DaVinci resolution and fast read and write speeds really start to show when scrubbing the timeline.
In my scenario I am using this Satechi Mac Mini Doc with a 1TB NVME I stole from my NAS that I use to store proxies, project files and exported videos. The doc is compatible with the “new” design refresh Apple did with the M4 Mac Mini last year, so it should work with the new M6 Mac Mini because it’s the same size as the M4.