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It may be helpful if you expand on this - how did you know to use Terminal, what did you do and how did you know to do that?

I ask because Terminal is practically the antithesis of the Mac experience for many people - a command line 'techie' approach to computing. Gotta wonder how many Mac users even know what it is. Reminds me of the Windows OS Registry, where the warning was stark - don't mess with this unless you know exactly what you're doing because make a mistake and you can cause a bad screwup.

Is what you did something the average Joe who's never used Terminal would readily figure out?
Terminal is what makes MacOS awesome. It’s a terminal into a true Unix kernel, which is fantastic to have.

Sure, the system should never get into a state where you need to use a terminal to recover. But we live in an imperfect world, with computers that sometimes fail and hungry puppies.
 
Terminal is what makes MacOS awesome. It’s a terminal into a true Unix kernel, which is fantastic to have.
For some I don't doubt that's the case. On the other hand, back when the Mac was earlier in its life, a big part of what made MacOS awesome was not having to deal with a command line interface (MS DOS back then), and having a GUI OS that wasn't a shell atop DOS (Windows 3.0, etc...) where you could still see things like C:\ show up. There are still many Mac users who wouldn't touch Terminal with a 10-foot pole unless they had to and someone told them exactly what to put in.

Terminal strikes me as metaphorically similar to a scalpel; in the hand of someone with the requisite technical skill and knowledge a powerful tool, but in the hands of anyone else...not so much.
 
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It may be helpful if you expand on this - how did you know to use Terminal, what did you do and how did you know to do that?

I ask because Terminal is practically the antithesis of the Mac experience for many people - a command line 'techie' approach to computing. Gotta wonder how many Mac users even know what it is. Reminds me of the Windows OS Registry, where the warning was stark - don't mess with this unless you know exactly what you're doing because make a mistake and you can cause a bad screwup.

Is what you did something the average Joe who's never used Terminal would readily figure out?
I think it's beneficial to know about and use Terminal now and then. After all, the entire macOS sits on a Unix-based system. And a lot of people here are Linux lovers, too!
 
Outstanding

I'm booting off an SN770 2TB in a Thunderbolt NVMe enclosure and not a single hiccup since I got it last week

It's faster than the internal SSD also!

Re: Heat:

I'm using this Acacia clone and it's been very cool in operation.
I'd imagine the specific SSD in use plays a big role here.
 
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On the other hand, back when the Mac was earlier in its life, a big part of what made MacOS awesome was not having to deal with a command line interface (MS DOS back then), and having a GUI OS that wasn't a shell atop DOS (Windows 3.0, etc...) where you could still see things like C:\ show up.
I sometimes miss those days, when being able to use a computer was a marketable skill. Now any idiot can use one, and many do. I remember visiting a friend who had the first Mac (MacIntosh). I was impressed (I had a Commodore 64). The first mouse I ever saw that didn't have hair.
 
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Still struggling with this due to huge iMessage storage

Besides iMessage and DaVinci, what other apps have issues if we run the OS directly from an external drive?
Anybody tried running VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop? Any issue?
 
I imagine having everything on one drive makes backup simpler. In the distant past I tried Time Machine once and found it rather confusing in practice (I grasped the concept); now I use CarbonCopy Cloner set to update my backup on an external SSD nightly when I'm in bed. No weird alternative universe where each file exists in a series of versions by time, hovering in front of me like some sci-fi warp display. I like it simple. Guessing CarbonCopy Cloner, Super Duper and Time Machine can backup multiple volumes, but how much complexity does it add to the process? Do they backup to a single volume, or do people partition the backup volume?

There are some technically sophisticated people using Macs, and there are some technically unsophisticated people (and shades of gray in between) using Macs.

Here's a thread that may be of use to some: Do external SSDs have more heating issues than internal? Why? Issues addressed:

1.) The often discussed substantial heat given off in Thunderbolt-based external SSD enclosures, and does it matter?

2.) Concerns about routine use of an external boot disc with Apple Silicon Macs (Post #11 has the link provided by PaulD-UK. Disclaimer: I personally don't see how that is a problem if you use the external as your startup disc. I get that making an Apple Silicon Mac boot off a different startup disc than it is accustomed to may be more hassle than it used to be?

It's interesting to me how different people go about using an external in different ways; some make the external their boot drive, some boot from the internal but move their 'home folder' to the external (IIRC, that makes Apple Intelligence work?), some use the internal for app.s and smaller files but the external for large libraries (e.g.: Photos) and big files, etc...

Anyone know if a good online article, Wikipedia page, YouTube! video or other resource that compares and contrasts the pro.s and con.s of each of those approaches?

It seems that simply moving everything to an external SSD as your startup disc would be the easiest way to go, for a desktop Mac like the Mini that's rarely moved. So why doesn't everybody just do that? I get that MacBook owners may want the option to not carry around an external SSD.
A good point about having one drive to back up.

I’m on a mac studio with 2TB and I fill that with my entire photo library, music library and my main family videos and documents.

I then have an external drive with all my other family Videos that I can’t fit on internally.

Lastly I have an 8TB LaCie 2 big for
Time Capsule which backs up the internal and my external.

It’s not difficult but having the one drive option would keep things simpler.

I also have a laptop which mirrors my laptop photos and music and documents as well which also gives me another form of redundancy.. at least for photos and music etc..
 
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I just got an M4 mini because, well, why not! I went with the 512GB option so there's a decent amount of space, but being the person I am I tend to hoard data and so added a 4TB external SSD.

Rather than boot off the external though - I'm keeping the OS and apps running off the internal drive and have followed one of the many YT tutorials on how to move just the Home folder to an external drive (OWC 1M2 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus drive). It's working great so far and I haven't noticed any performance issues. Plus Apple Intelligence works just fine.

The only downside is that I can't encrypt the external SSD - the encryption for external SSDs is in keychain which doesn't load until the account loads. I could do it by booting into an account on the internal drive then switching to my main account, but that gets silly. This isn't a big deal because the machine is always going to be in my house vs. a laptop that I move around with.

I'm dumping tons of stuff into that account so we will see how it holds/performs over time...
 
The only downside is that I can't encrypt the external SSD - the encryption for external SSDs is in keychain which doesn't load until the account loads.
Not sure I understand this. Doesn't right click on the desktop icon > Encrypt work for you. Or you can do it Disk Utility at time of formatting. I have often done this and not noticed any downsides. The encrypted drives mount on boot, same as non-encrypted.
 
I have been playing with this, albeit with a 512GB model, not a 256GB.

There are various alternatives that work, with varying degrees of practicality.

  1. Plain, standard USB 3 SSD. Read/Write speeds 300~400 MB/s. It works, and is acceptably fast, but not as fast as other solutions.
  2. Samsung T7 plugged into one of the Thunderbolt ports. R/W speeds 700~800 MB/s. Almost, but not quite, as fast as the internal drive. You may need a cooling solution, though. These drives are known to get hot when transferring lots of data. As well, don't fill it more than 75% full. They slowdown to ridiculous speeds when too full(< 100MB/s).
  3. Use the internal drive for the OS and put your User Folder on a fast external drive (You can do this via System Settings / Users & Groups / Right-Click User and select Advanced Options. The external volume you select needs to be formatted as APFS if you want Cloud Storage to work.
    1. You can use the above-mentioned Samsung T7 or similar drive
    2. or, you can set up an Apple RAID drive. I have two Samsung T5 drives, configured via Disk Utility as a RAID 0 drive. You will get best performance if you plug each drive into a different port on your Mac (I use the two front USB ports). That way the R/W performance of the RAID matches that of the T7 plugged into a Thunderbolt port. However, you can no longer install a System on an Apple RAID.
  4. For the adventurous, you can set up an external Fusion Drive. This will match a fast SSD with a large, slow HDD to give you (nearly) the performance of a large, fast SSD. Sort of. Maybe. On a good day.
Remember, Backup, Backup, Backup, or store your important documents on the cloud (MEGA, DropBox, Google Drive, whatever).
 
I have been playing with this, albeit with a 512GB model, not a 256GB.

There are various alternatives that work, with varying degrees of practicality.

  1. Plain, standard USB 3 SSD. Read/Write speeds 300~400 MB/s. It works, and is acceptably fast, but not as fast as other solutions.
  2. Samsung T7 plugged into one of the Thunderbolt ports. R/W speeds 700~800 MB/s. Almost, but not quite, as fast as the internal drive. You may need a cooling solution, though. These drives are known to get hot when transferring lots of data. As well, don't fill it more than 75% full. They slowdown to ridiculous speeds when too full(< 100MB/s).
  3. Use the internal drive for the OS and put your User Folder on a fast external drive (You can do this via System Settings / Users & Groups / Right-Click User and select Advanced Options. The external volume you select needs to be formatted as APFS if you want Cloud Storage to work.
    1. You can use the above-mentioned Samsung T7 or similar drive
    2. or, you can set up an Apple RAID drive. I have two Samsung T5 drives, configured via Disk Utility as a RAID 0 drive. You will get best performance if you plug each drive into a different port on your Mac (I use the two front USB ports). That way the R/W performance of the RAID matches that of the T7 plugged into a Thunderbolt port. However, you can no longer install a System on an Apple RAID.
  4. For the adventurous, you can set up an external Fusion Drive. This will match a fast SSD with a large, slow HDD to give you (nearly) the performance of a large, fast SSD. Sort of. Maybe. On a good day.
Remember, Backup, Backup, Backup, or store your important documents on the cloud (MEGA, DropBox, Google Drive, whatever).

Do you regret getting the 512GB? Mine is also 512GB but I am considering to go back to the base model + larger external boot drive.
 
Do you regret getting the 512GB? Mine is also 512GB but I am considering to go back to the base model + larger external boot drive.

No. The previous machine is an iMac with 2TB Fusion Drive, but I never used more than 400 GB, so the choice of a 512
GB Mac Mini was pretty obvious. I have just been playing with alternatives so that --
  1. I had a working, bootable backup of my current drive
  2. I had a working, bootable backup with the latest ßeta version of the OS
  3. I could see how far I could stretch the technology
 
I bought the Mini Pro with 512GB plus an external 2 TB drive - intending to boot off the external drive so I had a single 2TB drive for system, applications and data without the Apple storage cost.

In the end I gave up - all sorts of problems with Time Machine - migration worked OK but backing up the new machine failed with an obscure error message.

Then I discovered Apple Intelligence wasn't supported which made it useless for me as I want to make sure I have all the intelligent features of Xcode development in the future.

(I did read the work-arounds for getting AI going from an external boot but they looked risky to me)
 
I read that some M4 base model users experienced problems when using an external drive to store user folder. So I chose the configuration with the internal drive upgraded to 512GB. If I decide to install the OS to an external drive and boot from my it, will I run into problems if I go back to the base model with 256GB SSD?
 
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I bought the Mini Pro with 512GB plus an external 2 TB drive - intending to boot off the external drive so I had a single 2TB drive for system, applications and data without the Apple storage cost.

In the end I gave up - all sorts of problems with Time Machine - migration worked OK but backing up the new machine failed with an obscure error message.

Then I discovered Apple Intelligence wasn't supported which made it useless for me as I want to make sure I have all the intelligent features of Xcode development in the future.

(I did read the work-arounds for getting AI going from an external boot but they looked risky to me)
I am a bit confused. So when using the “booting the OS from an external drive” approach, some users have problems while others don’t? I am very sorry but are you sure that you set up your system properly?

@spaceballl Have you used Time Machine under this approach, any issue?
 
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I am a bit confused. So when using the “booting the OS from an external drive” approach, some users have problems while others don’t? I am very sorry but are you sure that you set up your system properly?
Maybe different users have different requirements.

If I had set up the Mini from scratch instead of migrating and didn't have any interest in Apple Intelligence maybe all would have been well.
 
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I am a bit confused. So when using the “booting the OS from an external drive” approach, some users have problems while others don’t? I am very sorry but are you sure that you set up your system properly?

@spaceballl Have you used Time Machine under this approach, any issue?

It may very well depend on the drive. I have had easy success using Samsung T3, T5 and T7 drives, as well as Crucial BX and MX SSD, but I couldn't, for the life of me, get it going using a Seagate Fast SSD.
 
It may very well depend on the drive. I have had easy success using Samsung T3, T5 and T7 drives, as well as Crucial BX and MX SSD, but I couldn't, for the life of me, get it going using a Seagate Fast SSD.
Booting from external drives on Silicon Macs has been a rocky road since Silicon was introduced in 2020. Experience between users has been variable and varied with time. At one time it was so flaky that many people believed that Apple was going to prevent external booting altogether, but the signs are that it has improved recently. Apple now even has an official article about booting from externals, so it is definitely supported.
 
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My 2 cents:
I don't like that the external drive (an Acasis 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVMe SSD with Samsung 970 Evo Plus) gets hot and stays hot all the time, even when the Mac sleeps.
And you are exactly right. Fanless enclosures struggle with sustained activity and it would be silly to run this way a desktop computer from which you expect consistent performance. All external SSSs will throttle their performance as heat nears their maximum, and all SSSs will experience a shorter lifespan from excess heat exposure.

If you absolutely must do this, use the ACASIS TBU401Pro. It’s $25 more and has a fan that you can switch on and leave on when using, and perhaps choose to turn off at idle.

For those of you on any pro M series mini, YES THERE IS a performance penalty from running the system on external volumes. Not noticing it means you only perform lightweight tasks that don’t take minutes to complete in the first place.

There is generally no reason to do this, although I keep bootable media around for testing and development. While I can understand the desire to keep things “simple” by structuring your files all on a single volume, it introduces several unnecessary vulnerabilities to your data, when you could just move your home folder and config App Store to install external (please note it only does this for apps greater than a gigabyte in size, and for best compatibility format your external as MacOS journaled)

The biggest vulnerability is increased risk of corruption which is far simpler to scan a repair on a non-boot system volume.

I’m using an M4 pro mini with a 4TB SSD that’s faster than the ACASIS TBU401 I have it connected to.

There exists ZERO thunderbolt 4 drives that can match the overall speed and performance of your internal SSD. *this will change with thunderbolt 5 enclosures compared against non-pro minis
 
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