One thing you can do is move your home directory to the external volume:
From what I’ve read, Books cannot be moved there (And so I guess its Library) so I will have to limit my downloaded Library for sure, but could Bootcamp be run on an external HDD? Do other apps like PixelMator run fine from an external HDD? And will Time Machine see the external HDD as part of the Mac mini for backups?Īnything can be put on an external drive, but some things are easy to move and others require a bit of hacking. I’m really interested in what can & cannot be put on an external HDD. Biggest change in my view for the M2 is increased memory bandwidth and the inclusion of the hardware media engines. Audio books should easily be stored on the external without being limited by transfer rates.Īlso as a final note, if you’re waiting till then end of the year, there’s a good chance that the Mac Mini will be upgraded to an M2 by then, either giving you access to the newer processor or discounts on the M1 Mini (introduced in Nov 2020). I would try to use the internal drive for booting and anything that requires the fastest data access.
Booting from that external makes the whole machine fly compared to the internal Fusion drive (used as backup now).
The high end NVMe I have hooked up to a 2017 iMac via Thunderbolt 3 peaks around 1500 MB/s. Most SSDs before the current crop of NVMes would top out at ~250 MB/s on a good day. A quick search shows people posting M1 Mini disk tests returning 2700-2800 MB/s r/w speeds. I can’t imagine many that would.ĭepending when you bought that SSD, and the type of connections an external enclosure supports, you might find that it is significantly slower than the internal storage in the M1 Mini. You can also boot M1 macs from external drives (with some caveats) so you could continue to use the 2TB drive as the main boot drive to remove any worries about badly designed apps that didn’t want to work with data not on the boot drive. You could also choose to boot off of an external, if you took that 2TB SSD out of the iMac and invested in an external case. Not being a time machine user, I can’t remember if TM allows only part of the drive to be used that way, or if you have to create separate volumes first.Īlso not a pixelmator user, but any app should be able to use an external for where it’s data lives. Time machine can use the external as a backup if you want, when first connected macOS still prompts if you’d like to use the drive for backup. Bootcamp won’t run on the M1, or any Apple silicon.
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