I haven’t heard anyone else talk about the SSDs on the new Macs, so maybe I’m the only one hoping for something around 10 to 15 GB/s. I’ve ordered two Mac minis to experiment with clustering.
TB5 can theoretically transfer* at 120 Gb/s = 15 GB/s, and three ports plus the local drive would mean something shy of 60 GB/s. The best accessory for a Mac mini would simply be another Mac mini (use-case dependent).
However, I’m tempering my expectations, given that one would think they’d have talked about it (although if it depends on the SSD size, they might have decided to not do so). Anyway, my fingers are crossed.
* Interestingly enough in the Intel publications I’ve seen as of a couple weeks ago, only the symmetric 80-80 Gb/s mode was available for networking, while the asymmetric 120-40 Gb/s mode was for display support. So it seems that either the Intel material was incorrect or Apple has added that functionality to TB5— in the Mac mini video, they explicitly show “120 Gb/s transfers”