Turn Your Mac Mini M4 Into a Full Workstation — Acasis M002 Pro Review

What you're looking at is the Aasis M00002 Pro. This is a dock, a stand, and an SSD enclosure specifically designed for the smaller form factor M4 Mac minis. Uh this is the M4 Mac Mini Pro that I've got inside this. Uh and what this means is we can also now attach up to two fast NVME drives uh underneath it, giving significantly more storage and at a fraction of the price that Apple would charge you to upgrade your storage on the Mac Mini itself at checkout. Uh we can also now power three external monitors through the additional connectivity that this gives. Uh we've also got SD and micro SD card reader on the uh the enclosure as well. Plus we've got some additional USB ports here as well. It also solves one other problem uh which you may be familiar with with the uh the latest generation of Mac minis which is that the power button is now a lot easier to reach rather than it being underneath the uh the Mac Mini itself. So in this video what I'm going to do is show you how it all goes together. talk about what I love about it. Uh things that I think could be improved perhaps for the next version uh and who this is actually for and specifically uh talking about how I'm going to be using this myself going forward. So uh let's get into it and we'll start with just looking at how we put it all together. So here is the empty enclosure made out of really solid sturdy aluminum. And uh what you need to do first of all to install the actual Mac Mini is undo these four screws that you'll find down the bottom. uh it does include the screwdriver that you're going to need to do that. Once you do that, then this entire bottom plate is going to drop off. And if we turn it uh upside down, then we can see that over on this side, you've basically got the area that houses all of the uh the input and output ports. Uh and then you've got the uh the actual drive bay itself in here, which we'll get into in a moment. But now you've got this space here, which is for the Mac Mini. Just notice that there are these cutouts down this side and this side. And then this is a sort of vented grill on the back. And so what we're going to do is take our Mac Mini and put it in there. The way to do this then is just notice that the grill is lined up with the the fan on the bottom of the Mac Mini. So it's going to slot in this way. Uh and then also we've got this button here which is the power button. So that needs to line up basically with the power button that we've got on the bottom of the the Mac Mini just down in this corner. So assuming you've got that then it's just a case of sliding this in. Uh you will see that this is sort of padded inside. So it's not metal on metal as such down there. Uh and then as we slide that in, you can actually see through those vents now. Uh that this is basically completely open to that that fan that we've got in the bottom of the Mac Mini. So it's going to allow for that air flow. And then obviously the aluminium itself is intended to help with that heat dissipation itself. So that's all there is to it really. Uh the button now is lined up with that power button on the Mac Mini. So now we just need to replace that plate on the bottom. And so it's just a case of taking that uh placing it back into the uh into the enclosure there like this and then uh replacing those four screws, which is what I'll do now. So having replaced those four screws, um I'm now going to open this uh side door here. So this is on the uh the vent is on this side. On this side, we've got this uh this door that comes off here, which is where we're going to put our SSD drive. So just unscrewing this single screw, you'll find that this whole plate just lifts out. Uh, and now you can see that we've got this area in here, uh, I don't know if you can see that actually with it being a bit dark, but there are two slots in there basically, uh, for us to put in our drives. And so these are these types of drives here. Uh, and I'm just going to sort of slot that in at 45°. Maybe easier if I've got it down on the desk. And once it's slotted in, then there are two little rubber plugs, uh, one for each of the drives that will hold it down. Uh, notice that you do also, uh, get, they've actually included four of these, but technically you only need two, so I guess spare ones. Uh, but these are intended for thermal protection and so these are going to go on your drive. Just make sure though there is this plastic film on them that you remove those first of all because you don't want that melting onto a hot drive. But once you got the plugs in, uh, you just simply apply that to the top of each of the drives and then you replace the uh, top casing here. Now that we've added the drives and the Mac Mini, it's a case of connecting the two things together. So, at the moment, we've just got an enclosure with the Mac Mini inside it, but there's nothing actually connecting them. And so, that's where we come onto these connectors on the back. Obviously, uh the gap in the enclosure there just gives us access to all of the Mac Mini connections. Then, on the Acasis itself, uh this connector at the top says host. Uh there is a 40 megabits per second gigabits per second, sorry, uh connector that comes with it. And so, that just needs to connect from uh the back of the dock there. and then plug into one of those Thunderbolt connectors on the the back of the Mac Mini. Then we've obviously got access to the power for the Mac Mini itself. Uh there is also an included 30 W power supply that comes with the Aasis as well. Um and so that connects down here. Um technically it might not be essential to have that connected. However, I just would recommend that you connect it because otherwise all the power for all of your peripherals would be just being drawn through here from the Mac Mini. Uh then you have still got obviously access to those two Thunderbolt ports there as well. Uh this is then to display port uh to power two external monitors. Uh that is how we've got now basically three monitors powered from this uh Mac Mini. So one HDMI out of the Mac Mini itself and two display ports there. Uh we mentioned earlier that you've got the um SD cards on the top, a micro SD card. You can use both of those at the same time. And then uh over on the front then we've got uh obviously the two Thunderbolt ports on the front of the Mac Mini itself. And then we've got three ports just down here that are USBA. Now I mentioned before about this power button uh to actually turn on the Mac Mini. Just notice that there is a separate power button here which is actually to turn on the power for the dock at the front here. So, uh, when you are switching this on, you're going to, uh, turn on the Mac Mini itself and then also turn on the power here. And there is a little green indicator light there. So, um, we've now got obviously significantly improved storage on our Mac Mini Pro and or Mac Mini M4 Mac Mini. And we've also got this additional sort of inputs and outputs and monitors. Uh so let's take a look at some of the specs then because the way that we connect these um internal drives is actually going to dictate the speeds that we can get out of it. So you'll find this link down in the description as well, but I just want to draw your attention to the model that I've got here uh which is the M002 Pro. There is also the M002 Plus. Um but just notice that the Pro has the two drive bays that I'm talking about. Uh the Plus just has a single drive bay. So just make sure that you notice that. And this one has dual SSD. Uh this one here where it says single SSD would be that other one. Hopefully it should be obvious from the picture, but just notice the one that I'm talking about here. Um so then if we just come down here, you'll see various different things related to the speeds and so on. It's worth just drawing your attention and I won't go over every single uh uh spec here. Um but just notice if we scroll down a little bit, uh you'll see that there are these different uh speeds listed here. And so just so that this is does not become too confusing here. um where it's talking about single uh M4. So that's the single chip. Uh when you've got dual, that is two chips in it. Uh two u um SSD cards, I should say. But then we've got RAID zero and RAID one. So it's worth uh just explaining what that actually means. Now, if you go into your disk utility on your Mac uh and then go into the file menu, uh you'll see that there's an option for RAID assist. And so let's just take a look at this because uh this is to do with how you actually set up those two uh drives that you've got in the uh in the enclosure. So the first option then is striped uh RAID zero. This is basically where um your computer is going to see these two drives and effectively just see them as a single drive and it's going to stripe across them. So what that means is uh it's going to split the data between those two drives. And so uh it's not uh it's not creating any backup but it's going to give you additional speed because essentially you can write to these two things at the same time. The second option is mirrored. Now this is one where you want to have redundancy. Basically the two drives that you've got in there are going to just be a mirror of one another assuming that they are the same size. Obviously if they're not the same size you're going to be limited to the uh smaller drive size. But as if you've got two uh let's say two terabyte drives in there uh then the uh the total space you're going to have is two terabytes. However, um everything that is being written to the drive is going to be written simultaneously to both drives. So that's going to give you that redundancy. Um then uh we've got this one concatenated or JB OD. Uh that is just meaning that it's going to see these things as two completely separate drives and you could maybe have you know store some things on one and some things on the other. So basically, if you're looking for security and redundancy, then you want to go with mirrored. If you're looking for additional speed, then uh that's going to be this striped RAID zero uh spreading out over two drives, but uh and combining the total of the drives. Um but uh you can't just sort of assess address each drive individually. Um or this one JBO is if you want to have two separate drives attached uh within the storage bay. So the point to note there though is that RAID zero is going to be the fastest and RAID one and JBOD are not going to be not going to give you that that uh same speed. Now if we come back over to the spec sheets then uh this is where you're going to see the uh uh the difference here with RAID zero and RAID one. Now, uh just to add a slight another little uh [laughter] twist in the story here, uh it also depends on what you've got connected in terms of the displays over the uh display ports that are connected into the back as well because obviously if you're powering uh you know two external displays uh then there is going to be data transfer into that as well. So uh that's just to explain what this means down here. If you come and have a look at this where we've got dual displays 5K at 60 Hz uh 4K at 144 hertz then uh this is now the read write speed that you're going to get again in that RAID zero and RAID one configuration and it's just taken a couple of different NVME SSDs here uh for uh uh for the the test. So this is what this is based on. Different drives may well have different speeds. So that is just to explain uh the different read write speeds that you're getting from this. So just to also be clear about the multiple displays because this is a question that comes up often with uh in particular the Macs and Mac minis because there is a limit on how many displays can be powered by a particular Mac. Now the M4 Mac Mini uh Mac Mini Pro can power these three external displays. So just so that we're absolutely clear about this uh because the naming is a little bit confusing as well in in these terms. These have display port connections on the back. That is the type of connector. So, it's an alternative to HDMI. Uh, if you've got HDMI monitors, uh, then you would require an H a display port to HDMI adapter to then plug into those. It's totally interchangeable and there'll be no problem with that whatsoever. Uh, the reason why I mention this is because there is another thing which we talk about when we're talking about multiple displays, which is display link. Display link is a software technology um and built into certain uh docs. For example, I've got a couple of wavelength docs that power up to four or five uh external monitors. Uh the reason why I say that is because this is not what's going on here. These are just powering these uh monitors natively uh with what we can power from the uh from the Mac itself. So, don't worry that uh you're going to need to have any other piece of software. You just plug this in and it will just work and be able to power those monitors. So, let's just take a look at some of the other specs. Then, if we just come down here, I won't go through all of these, but you can see here a comparison. And this just gives you an idea of those different speeds uh that you're going to get from the the data transfer, but also uh from those USB sockets that we've got attached as well. So, let's talk about some pros and cons then. First of all, if you are a fan of the Mac Pro, then I'm sure you'll appreciate the sort of design aesthetic of this and giving us that sort of similar looking uh form factor in this really teenytiny package obviously made possible because of just the small size of the the Mac Mini. So, I personally really do love the form factor. Uh, of course, Apple and design purists would say uh you know, maybe the enclosure uh gap here uh should completely match this one to make them exactly the same and make them exactly equal in terms of the spacing and things like that. But hey, I'm a designer, so those kind of things leap out at me. But apart from that, the build quality on it and everything is is just really uh really great. The main point about this though is obviously with a Mac Mini, we can power up to three monitors. Um, and I think these days most people have got more than one monitor or maybe these are just the circles that I move in. So, the ability to just uh get the full sort of three monitor allowance, if you want to call it that, that that we've got on the or capability that we've got on the Mac Mini out of this enclosure is is great for that reason. But, of course, the other thing though is the ability to just maximize our storage or at least increase it in a more affordable way. Now, I say it more affordable because uh the dock itself, so this unit is $169 at the moment as it stands on the Cas's website. Uh there are some offers that run from time to time as well and you may be able to get one at a different price but that is the current cost of it. And then when we pair that with external drives um it still is going to be significantly lower than uh you know if we jump from say you know a terabyte to two terabytes uh in on when we actually spec out our Mac Mini. And what that means is we can be a little bit more conservative with the way that we spec out the Mac Mini. Uh, and for me, for example, on this one, I've just got 500 uh gigabytes on the actual Mac Mini itself, knowing that I can put in additional drives into the enclosure. And yes, mission critical stuff is still running on the actual Mac Mini drive itself. All the apps and software and stuff are are are installed on that. However, you know, I can have all my data uh installed on the external drives in the enclosure. And of course, we've also got the possibility then of having those in a RAID configuration to either give us more speed or more security or however we want to to do that. And also allows us to maybe swap out for larger drives at some point in the future if we need to uh need to do that. So for me, those are the biggest two features. It's the uh the ability to have the additional monitors and also the additional uh capacity in there. There are obviously uh some additional uh sockets on here. So, we've got the uh SD card reader there, the micro and regular SD card reader. Um, now for me, that's not a thing. I don't really use those, but I know many people do. So, uh, having that conveniently on the top there that you can just pop in your cards, I'm sure, will be helpful for some people. And then we've also got the additional USB sockets on the on the front there. Uh, now obviously on the back of the um Mac Mini, we've got three Thunderbolts, but one of those is taken up by uh connecting to the dock itself. So, we're kind of losing one of those. Uh, but we're gaining uh these three USBA. Now, that brings me on to one of the things that I wish was slightly different about this. And I've got to say, it's not just a case really. I'm finding this with many manufacturers of docks and hubs and so on that there does seem to still be a an emphasis on USBA with a lot of manufacturers when these days so many of the peripherals that we're getting and adding into our setups um are using USBC. So it would have been great to see uh more USBC and fewer of the USBA. It seems like maybe just one USBA and the the others USBC. Uh similarly I would say there perhaps is the opportunity to just add more as well. I mean the power supply that I mentioned uh it has is a 30 watt power supply if it was possible uh to maybe have you know additional um USBC in here with a bigger power supply. Uh, so you know, rather than these being hor vertically orientated like here, imagine if there were like, I don't know, six or eight USBC's in a sort of vertical arrangement like that, but then just have a much bigger power supply. Uh, that would be uh really great, but I guess we can't have everything all at once. Now, just to say how we're using this in my setup. Now, normally I am using this Mac Mini Pro in my uh for my recordings, but I've just switched over to my uh my laptop at the moment. But the point is I've actually got six monitors connected here. Now, what this allows me to do then is connect three of those kind of natively. Um, and then the others are being powered by an external dock that is using the uh display link software. Uh, it's better if you can to have the, you know, use the allowance that we've got first before we use display link. Obviously, any amount of monitors that you're driving uh on the computer is taking up processing power. Um, but if they're going through display link, it's basically another layer of uh processor required on top of that just because it's going through the the software. So uh three monitors connected using this is uh lightening that load in in some ways as well. Obviously then there is the uh the storage issue as well. Um but in this sort of studio setup I have got just one or two additional USB things connected. So even with the additional connectivity that this gives, it's still not enough. So I do have a secondary um USB hub uh that is or Thunderbolt hub I should say uh that is allowing me to connect other things like my road cer and various cameras and and stuff like that. So this is basically just giving me that expansion of the uh the storage and some additional connectivity there and the monitors and then for you know all the other things and then uh using some additional docks and hubs for that as well. But all in all uh a really great addition and a really great way to as I say just expand out uh the uh the connectivity that you've got on your Mac Mini. Now I've left a link down in the description to all of this and the the links and so on. Uh, what you'll find over here is a video that YouTube thinks you may want to watch.