professorkamrankhan@gmail.com 
The Orico Minimate is speedy external storage designed for the Mac mini. It works, is reasonably fast, and saves space, but is unacceptably loud.
Adding external storage to a Mac is one way to get around Apple’s capacity upgrade fees. However, doing so without making your desktop an eyesore is easier said than done.
The Orico Minimate is a storage device that is intended to fit above or below your M4 Mac mini. Doing so saves you from taking desk area away, and, besides, it looks great.
It’s just too loud to wholeheartedly recommend to everybody.
Orico Minimate review: Design
The Orico Minimate is five inches by five inches, sporting rounded corners, and is just one inch in height. It mimics new Mac mini styling and is clearly designed to go in a stack.
Orico Minimate review: On top of a Mac mini
The design also applies to the base, which includes a round vented section and rubber feet. This doesn’t extend to the top, which has the Orico logo instead of the Apple logo.
The front and sides are plain. The back has the 40-gigabit USB Type-C port, located in the middle of the base of the unit. There’s also the vent.
As promised, I’ve tested Wi-Fi interference from a device intended to be the foundation of a Mac mini stack. Without a doubt, put the Orico Minimate on the top of the Mac mini, it dramatically cuts Wi-Fi speed and range if you don’t.
Unfortunately, that leaves the Orico branding on top, instead of the Mac mini logo.
Orico Minimate review: Connectivity and Storage
Inside the Orico Minimate is an NVMe SSD, varying in capacities between 512GB and 8TB. It’s storage that is not accessible to the user at all, so you can’t replace it with other storage.
We’re reviewing the 2TB version.
Orico Minimate review: The rear USB Type-C port and the fan exhaust.
While decidedly Mac styled, the drive actually ships formatted in exFAT. This is a choice that maximizes immediate support with hardware running macOS, Windows, Linux, and even iOS and Android.
In AppleInsider’s testing, the drive manages to achieve about 2.2 gigabytes per second for write speeds. Reads are at about 2.6 gigabytes per second, formatted in exFAT.
This is sustained for about three minutes before the cache is full, and speeds drop to about a quarter of the tested write speeds. There does not appear to be a RAM cache on the SSD, and doing some diving on Orico’s site, it looks like it has a 500GB SLC flash cache instead.
APFS formatting speeds up the drive a bit, but doesn’t do anything about the cache filling.
Orico Minimate review: A fan issue
Drives get hot. Heat slows drives. Orico decided a fan was a good idea.
A fan is an excellent idea in an enclosure. Just not this fan in this enclosure.
A big negative about the Orico Minimate is the noise. While everything else is generally acceptable to users, the fan that cools the storage down is a problem.
Using an Extech SL510 sound meter, with the drive unmounted and off, our workspace registers 42.1 dBa just from fans and other ambient noise. No, I don’t work in the quietest office space.
When in use and cooling the included storage, we were able to register a loudness of 55.1 dBa at a distance of three feet when hammering on the drive, and 49.0 dBa when the drive is idle.
For the peak noise, this is the difference between a relatively quiet home and the sound of moderate traffic from the sidewalk.
My entire gaming PC, when under load, is quieter.
We were hoping the unit was defective, so we researched it a bit. Nope, turns out this is normal.
And, based on what we know about the AppleInsider core audience on the aggregate, it’s a problem.
Getting a fan to be quiet is a combination of engineering and physics. Those things cost money, of course, but they are both solved problems.
They just aren’t solved in the Minimate.
Orico Minimate review: Does the job, just too loud
Stackable hardware that looks nice stacked with other hardware is nice, and we like the Minimate for that. Things start to break down a bit if you look at other elements of the drive for too long.
Orico Minimate review: Adequate storage, not spectacular.
For a start, the Minimate is just a storage drive. It’s not a dock providing extra ports or other utilities — it’s just storage. The Satechi Mac mini Stand & Hub does this, and also functions as an NVMe enclosure too.
With the exception of styling, it is just an external NVMe drive. It provides decent enough access speeds for the price, but it does not really stand out either.
If you really need the storage and want this form factor, you could do better elsewhere. If it’s this particular drive, then you’re better off waiting for it to go on sale.
And there’s the cost. If you shop well, for roughly the same cost, you can get a USB4 NVMe enclosure and a 2TB drive of your own choosing, perhaps with a RAM cache. It may not be stackable with your Mac mini, but at least you’ll have more control over how much storage it can hold.
It won’t disturb your workspace, either.
Orico Minimate review pros
- Mac mini styling
- Adequate performance
Orico Minimate review cons
- Just a drive for hub money
- Has to go on top of a Mac mini stack, or Wi-Fi gets slower
- Loud fan
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
The price-to-performance is okay. It’s not great, but it’s okay. That fan noise, though, is a real problem.
It turns something pretty nice, into something that works, and does what it says it will do, into something that has too many compromises to make it a universal recommendation. There are better choices that are quieter.
Where to buy the Orico Minimate
The Orico Minimate is available from Amazon, starting from $99.99 for 512GB, rising to $199.99 for 2TB. At review time, there’s a 5% off coupon on Amazon, but it’s still not worth the price for what you get.
It’s only worthwhile, and comparable to a build-your-own if it drops below $165 or so, and even then, the fan noise may be an issue at your desk. It’s probably fine as the storage drive for a media computer or game console in an already-louder environment.
