Mac mini with M.2 NVME external drive configuration

If you run this script from the terminal it will enable Apple Intelligence on external drive booting…

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kyle-Ye/XcodeLLMEligible/release/0.2/scripts/override.sh | bash -s -- install override xcodellm+greymatter+strontium

Works on macOS Sequoia 15.3.2 currently. May break on future os updates.

Install macOS on the external drive and use that to boot and run the Mac mini.

2TB is a respectable capacity for a new computer.

Install macOS on an external storage device and use it as a startup disk - Apple Support

Use it or not however you wish. The internal drive will continue to be bootable and you can still use it for storage.

Having it as a bootable drive may be useful should any problem arise with the external drive.

You would not want to use the NVME drive in the Satechi Hub as your main boot drive unless it is a TB enclosure as the speed would be much lower than your internal drive. As already noted get a larger external TB drive and use that as your boot drive. Just a side note that if you use the external you cannot use Apple Intelligence app.

I have been booting my M2 mini from an external drive for the last 17 months.

For the first year I used a cheap Crucial 1TB SSD in a USB 3.0 enclosure (total cost £60).

Of course the speed of the drive was only 20% of the internal SSD BUT for all normal tasks including FCP film editing it was virtually as fast and there was no way it felt any slower. The only time its speed was obvious was when copying massive (50GB+) files but that is something I rarely, if ever do.

Then 5 months ago I decided to see how much better a 1TB Crucial NVMe in a Thunderbolt housing (total £130) would be.

YES, this drive is much faster, even faster than the internal SSD BUT for all normal tasks it feels just the same as the "slow" SSD.

On timed tests it might be up to 5% faster than the USB but there is no way you can feel the difference.

Of course it is quicker if you copy a massive file.

So was it worth forking out the extra cash . . . ?