how do you guys deal with the small hard drive?

[Fishrrman]

"And I guess I have to change something in settings regarding the T2 security chip so I can boot from the external SSD?"

^^^^
THIS is important.
You would first want to boot to the recovery partition, open the Startup Security Utility, and DISABLE all the t2 settings.
I would also turn off SIP (using the terminal) while I was in the recovery partition.

I would set up my external boot SSD as HFS+ (not APFS), but this takes a few extra steps and might require a second external drive (with a copy of Mojave running APFS on it).

My "USB3 Mojave test SSD" boots and runs quickly under HFS+ (no "startup delay")...

 

[Synchro3]

On a HFS+ drive Mojave won't do any updates.

In the T2 settings I would just enable external booting and medium security, and leave SIP alone.

 

[Fishrrman]

Synchro wrote:
"On a HFS+ drive Mojave won't do any updates."

There are ways around this.
Booted and running from a USB3 SSD running Mojave under HFS+ as I type this.
You just have to know what to do!

 

[jerwin]

does macos support trim on external ssds?

 

[tedson]

I have a I7/8GB/128GB that I upgraded to 16GB of memory myself (for about 60% of the price Apple wanted to charge).

My storage breakdown is as follows
Applications 15.31 GB (mostly due to Xcode)
Books 6 MB
Documents 11.63 GB
iCloud Drive 8.7 MB
iOS files 3.37 GB
iTunes 32.06 GB
Mail 4.3 MB
Messages Zero
Music Creation Zero
Photos 7.03 GB
Trash Zero

Other Users 98.2 MB
System 16.67 GB

That leave me with 46 GB available.

I keep all of my seldom used media files (movies, music, photos) on a separate media server. I also delete stuff I will never use from the Applications, Utility and Library folders (Garage band stuff, desktop photos I will never use, foreign fonts that I can't read, etc.). I have a shell script that I run that cleans out that junk whenever I install/upgrade the system. I'm also pretty diligent on deleting old stuff that I won't use anymore. I also just bought a 2TB external HD for $70 for extra space for seldom used files that I do want to keep as well as periodic images of my internal drive for archive purposes.


Other people have other needs that they will need to evaluate themselves but for me, I can live quite nicely with 128 GB of internal storage as long as one don't insist on keeping every document and media file ever created on my internal boot drive.