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My external benched slightly faster than the internal -- didn't save a screenshot, my apologies

At worst it was a lateral move that has enormously pleased "my wallet"
The reason I ask...

I'm using an M4 Pro Mini, base configuration, with a maximum performance Thunderbolt 4 SSD. I did not move my home folder, because the entire computer performs better booting from the internal. Instead, I work in linked folders on my external drive & point apps that store huge data (like the App Store) to the external. App Store does this automatically for programs over 1GB.


Unless you have a base (non pro) Mac mini, or are using a very rare thunderbolt 5 SSD, booting from an external drive will slow your performance. I'm waiting on delivery of the ACASIS TBU501 thunderbolt 5 enclosure to hold my 4TB SSD, which would negate the issue, but I enjoy not having to worry about whether I can use my machine if the external fails/data corrupts, or cabling becomes problematic.
 
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Hi, given that we can just save large files such as photos, videos, downloads directly to an external drive or just move them there manually by drag and drop, why go through all the troubles to move the home folder to an external drive?

Because the home folder is the default location for all manner of stuff. Such as your libraries for Photos, iMovie, iTunes, etc. Its a little up front trouble to make sure you don't need to think about it moving forward once set up.
 
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Because the home folder is the default location for all manner of stuff. Such as your libraries for Photos, iMovie, iTunes, etc. Its a little up front trouble to make sure you don't need to think about it moving forward once set up.
exactly, convenience for me, much cheaper , i have 256gb base mini4 model, just my 3 iphones full backup alone almost 500gb storage needed, apple pay and apple intelligence will not work thru external booting.
 
Indeed. This is a known issue, and very frustrating. I had a SanDisk fail just a couple months ago.

If I had a Mac mini, I would definitely boot off an external drive. I'm even considering doing so with my 2019 iMac, because the Fusion Drive is proving to be a little unreliable (also a common issue).
Sandisk externals ssd are god awful, had two fail on me in less then a year.
 
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I just deleted all my crap until it fits.
Forcing yourself to re-assess your hoarded digital goods is an overlooked benefit. I did the same when I went from...

I added an SSD internally — I can’t recall the capacity — to compliment the 500GB HDD of my 2012 Mac mini probably 4-5 years into its life. Then, a few years later, installed macOS onto a 1TB USB 3.1 (NVMe) drive.

…To a 512GB SSD M1 Mac mini (because I got it for a good price secondhand). For the most part, I’ve continued to keep things tidy. At the moment, the only folder I need to clean up (again) is Downloads.
 
Because the home folder is the default location for all manner of stuff. Such as your libraries for Photos, iMovie, iTunes, etc. It’s a little up front trouble to make sure you don't need to think about it moving forward once set up.

Thanks. If the Mac needs to use swap, will it use the internal or external SSD? If we could choose, is it whichever the faster drive is?
 
There are a multitude of reasons. Some that come to mind at the moment are:

• It falls within the realm of “I like to tinker.” In other words, it’s a challenge to accomplish, where time spent isn’t an expense but rather satisfaction.
• Believe it’s “sticking it to the man.” Although, the man — in this case Apple — mostly likely couldn’t care less.

I guess, I’ll say in my opinion…”Frankensteining,” “Jerry rigging,” modding, hacking, whatever you want to call it is okay when trying to extend the usefulness of a tool that has already been utilized to what might be dubbed its end of life is sensible. However, slap sticking solutions to a new item is an apparent doubling down on mistakes, you rationalized buying the wrong tool or version of tool, now you’re going to “fix” it by half-***ing it into the tool it should have been.

It's not a mod or a hack lol, Apple provides a UI in System settings to move the location of your home directory. This isn't blackhat stuff, ROFL.
 
Thanks. If the Mac needs to use swap, will it use the internal or external SSD? If we could choose, is it whichever the faster drive is?
If you move the home folder, the system and swap remain on the internal drive. If you boot from external, it operates from there. Better performance is from internal.
 
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Create an administrator account and log in using that. Go to settings, users, and you can select the user whose home folder you want to move and edit the users properties. There you can specify the user’s home folder location.

A basic administrator account is always advisable separate from your primary user account, and as long as you don’t sign into iCloud or start using apps with the administrator account, it will only use a tiny amount of space for the administrator’s credentials and preferences.
 
They are however sacrificing some performance. In many cases it's not going to be a deal breaker, but it's a consideration many would want to know about.

Not on a base Mini

All that said yes you’re right.. if performance and ease are the main concerns, and cost is not, just buy whatever Apple sells for sure
 
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I’ve tried to run macOS solely on my 1TB SanDisk Extreme external SSD, but it would fail to boot the second or third time. Apparently this is an issue with different SanDisk (maybe even WD given the company connections) drives, so keep that in mind. For the people that this has worked for, congratulations on not having to pay $200 for 512GB of internal storage (I envy you)!
Use Thunderbolt not USB.
 
[…] Although, I go further and boot totally off external NVMe in a TB enclosure and ignore the internal SSD completely

Running flawlessly now for nearly a full month since I got the M4 Mini base
Doing that will all my Macs.
 
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Just a heads up from old school Unix person. This is exactly what we used to do in the 90s and is completely normal on Unix systems. macOS is a Unix system. This is fine and normal.

The operating system would stay on the internal disk (root mount at / ) and then we'd hang an external SCSI disk off the back of it which had the home directories ( /home on Unix and /Users on mac). macOS is a Unix system. There is no shame or problem with this.

At this point though I'd make sure it was a decent high quality SSD, that it's formatted either APFS or if you really must, journaled macOS extended. That should survive any crashes power failures and sleep/wakeup cycles fine.

Personally I'd go for a decent quality OWC TB3/4 NVMe bridge and put an NVMe Samsung 990 Pro or something in it rather than buy an off the shelf disk. Because you never know what you're going to get.
 
Choosing the right ext drive for running OS is crucial. I always use T7.
Tooo slow. Booting via USB drive by a Mac with an internal SSD (not HDD) will severely hamper performance of any computer. Maybe you don’t care, but people who like to update their computers now and then and despise beach balls in their face don’t want this.

If anyone is serious about routinely (or worse continuously) running a Mac computer in general use from an external drive should use Thunderbolt 3/4/5. If you use the computer for tasks like large RAW photo shoots and/or video, you need a thunderbolt SSD with a built-in fan if you want to keep peak performance for more than 30 minutes.

Booting externally is something I’ve done for testing and troubleshooting, and I even had an original 27” iMac whose internal HDD failed and I didn’t want to open it, so for years it did light duty booting off FireWire 800. Obviously that was crap.

But making your primary, daily use Mac boot externally should be a last resort action—as in your internal SSD is non-functional or unreliable. Not because you are space hungry.
 
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It's convenient and simple to have everything in one place and on one drive

Although, I go further and boot totally off external NVMe in a TB enclosure and ignore the internal SSD completely

Running flawlessly now for nearly a full month since I got the M4 Mini base
Does Apple Intelligence work? I’d read that was broken moving to external boot.

I would love to see an individual benchmark of the internal drive as well as the external boot drive.
They’re in the relevant threads. I’ve shared my own. In short: internal is ~2500MB/s and external is ~3000 MB/s.

It's not a mod or a hack lol, Apple provides a UI in System settings to move the location of your home directory. This isn't blackhat stuff, ROFL.
But Apples support isn’t 100% and some things break. Need to know limits don’t matter for your usage. They make it unusable to me.
 
Does Apple Intelligence work? I’d read that was broken moving to external boot.
This is why I eventually gave up on the idea (that and all the hassle I had in migrating TM backups).

There were some workarounds linked on an earlier thread but they looked a bit risky to me.

I now use my external TB drives for data and include symbolic links from Documents and Downloads folders.
 
This is why I eventually gave up on the idea (that and all the hassle I had in migrating TM backups).

There were some workarounds linked on an earlier thread but they looked a bit risky to me.

I now use my external TB drives for data and include symbolic links from Documents and Downloads folders.
I moved Photos, Music, TV, and all large apps to the external. My user files per se are pretty small (loads of text files), so they fit fine on the 256GB.

If there was a discovery of fixes to Apple’s problems / bugs / limits with user folders or macOS installation, I’d consider changing it up. But I have a solid solution as is.
 
Not a problem I have, but I understand why people are making the effort. For one thing, if you backup your mobile devices, it puts the backup in your home directory.

What backup method do you use to backup your mobile devices?
 
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