Beelink Mate Mini 80 Gbps

I’ve just received my Beelink Mate Mini 80 Gbps dock for the Mac Mini M4, and after half an hour of playing with it, I’m really quite impressed. It looks and feels very “native” – it can be positioned strategically on top of, or right below, your Mac Mini. It closely follows Apple’s aesthetic and doesn’t look out of place in the slightest.

The most important thing for me was SSD speed – I’ve chosen the single-disk, full-speed version, which should be able to achieve full performance with my Mac Mini M4 Pro, and I must say it didn’t disappoint. Compare these results – before, using my “40 Gbps USB4 adapter”:

… and after:

This is still somewhat short of the Mac Mini’s internal SSD, which, incredibly, reaches 7 Gbps write speed (albeit at the same slower read speed of about 5 Gbps), but this might be down to my particular SSD – I’ll have to experiment further. Either way, read speed is critical for me – Lightroom simply flies and loads 50 MB RAW files instantly, without any visible delay.

The only mild annoyance I have is that the process of installing the SSD could have been simpler. Frankly, I suspect it’s a bit more complex than what your average iPhone user could handle, but if you’ve ever built your own PC (or perhaps replaced an SSD in a laptop), you’ll feel right at home. The process starts with peeling off the sticky rubber anti-slip strips… and kind of goes downhill from there.

Once everything is put back together, though, it works like a breeze. They even include two cables – one for positioning above, and one for placing it below your Mac Mini:

Overall, I’m really happy with it – let’s see how it goes, but so far, so good.