I’ve had a iMac for years and would like to replace it with a Mac mini. I’m thinking about purchasing the base mini with 256 gb of storage and relying on an external drive like (Crucial X9 Pro for Mac 4TB TLC NAND Portable SSD) to house my userid and all of my photos, music, and movies - right now about 2 TB of storage. Possible? Any concerns? Thanks!
I recommend one of the following processes:
I would not move the documents folder but you could make the default location for your documents to be in a folder on your external. No matter what I find having a 256GB internal drive as too small because over time the drive will fill up with "system storage" and other apps and you want some headroom for later OS updates as size can grow. I have a 512GB internal and just have large files on my external. You could also try to replace the drive by an aftermarket drive as some have shown on YouTube but there is a risk of damaging the hardware.
I have been using the base model M2 mini for the last 17 months and have been booting first from a cheap 1TB USB 3.0 SSD.
Although this drive only had a speed of 360MB/s the whole computer worked virtually as fast editing with Final Cut Pro and Resolve as using the internal but of course saved it from wear.
3 months ago I got a much faster and more expensive Thunderbolt NVMe.
It copies gigantic files much quicker but I don't do that very often.
So all in all I should probably have stayed with the USB 3.0 and saved my money!
No problems at all in that time booting off the externals.
Thanks. So, if I go this route, I could move movies, photos, music to the external drive but keep my user(s) on the mini. What about my documents folder?
and if I do this, do you believe I can get away with the entry level mini?
If you follow my suggested route your internal drive will not fill up with anything as it will not be used unless you deliberately do so.
When you get your new mini you will have to set it up with your user account to get it working.
Then download and install Sequoia on your external and you will be asked again to set up a user account on that.
From then on use the external as your boot drive with all your apps etc. . . . Simples!
The only possible snag is that Apple AI and Apple Pay may not work but if you need them you can simply boot into the internal drive which takes less than 30 seconds.
One thing to note, depending on the apps that you use, they can store anywhere from a few megabytes of data on the internal drive to 10's of gigabytes on the internal drive in the normally hidden <user name>/Library folder. This data can be caches for the app, libraries for the apps, databases, etc. These can use up space quite quickly.
Personally, if all you do is email, web surfing, texting, watch streaming services, and occasional Pages documents, 256GB may be fine. If you do anything much beyond that, 512GB internal is a minimum storage size.
If he boots from the external and has his apps on it no data will be stored on the internal.
Using an external drive with the base Mac mini
