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Will this work?

Should help considerably if the boot drive it replaces is HDD.

Assuming the first drive will be external (old HDD) for storage and the SSD will go inside to replace the existing HDD?

Or, are you planning to put the SSD in the dock and boot off of it? That will work too, but USB 3 may be slightly slower than the internal SATA III bus. Faster than an HDD boot drive, but not optimal.

The HDD > SSD swap is not too bad, I have done it twice on 2014 Mini. It requires a could of Torx drivers and a tool to pull the motherboard out of the case. iFixit has all the tools and a very good tutorial. if you can turn a screwdriver, and have some patience, you can do the drive swap.
 
I am planning to boot off the External device. I have still active apple care on the mini and do not want to void it.
 
Those components should work for booting your Mac off of an external drive. That said, they aren't the parts that I would use by default. If you're only going to be using an external SSD, you can get a much cheaper 2.5" mount, like this one on Amazon for only $10. I'm also not familiar with SSDs from OWC, but there are plenty of options (WD, Samsung, etc.) in the same price range. Any 2.5" SATA SSD on Amazon with good reviews will work just fine.
 
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I ordered from OWC because I have bought their products before and never had a problem.
I bough that dock as I will be doing some swapping drives. (To have different OS installs)
 
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wellander1 said:
I ordered from OWC because I have bought their products before and never had a problem.
I bough that dock as I will be doing some swapping drives. (To have different OS installs)
Click to expand...

I've used OWC's products for many, many years and always been satisfied. Drives, docks, PCie cards, etc., all have worked flawlessly, and using a dock to run different OSs is so easy for those times when a program no longer works with a given OS, like with the upcoming Catalina, which will no longer support 32 bit apps.
 
If you copied everything exactly using something like CCC, or if you installed fresh onto the external drive, you should be able to use a boot keypress to boot into the external drive. I can't recall if there's a direct keypress, but if you hold down "option" after booting, it should bring up a menu where you can select the drive you want.
 
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