Truability wrote:
So i have a 2014 Mac mini, and to speed things up I somewhat recently decided to run the entire OS off an external Samsung SSD. It’s worked great since, but looking to upgrade to the new m1 Mac mini.
My question is basically, how would I go about this? Of course the new Mac will have Big Sur installed, the SSD has Mohave I believe. I just don’t know how easy it’ll be to run things off that external SSD.
Does the SSD have to be reformatted to run on the new OS?
Any tips would be helpful!
First off, the new M1 Macs can only run Big Sur period. Not just because it is a new CPU architecture, but has been true with Macs for a very long time that they cannot run an OS earlier than the one they were released with.
Second, with any external SSD other than a Thunderbolt 3/4 SSD will run significantly slower than when using the internal SSD, Generally speed tests on the internal SSDs on M1 Macs are in the neighborhood of 2800-3000 megabytes per second which currently only Thunderbolt, nVME based drives can come close to.
Also, big note since you are running Mojave, Big Sur will only support 64 bit apps so any 32 bit apps you are currently using in Mojave will be useless and either updates, upgrades, or alternatives will need to be found. While you can use Migration Assistant to transfer things from the current external drive, you need to be aware of the issue with apps.
