The process will erase everything on your drive, so make sure there is nothing important on it or you have already backed up your drive before proceeding. Fortunately, this can be done in less than a minute on your M1 Mac with the help of Disk Utility app. You have to format it to APFS in order to start up M1 Mac from those devcies. Usually, an external hard drive, SSD or USB is formatted by FAT32 or exFAT by default. For latest macOS, APFS is more recommended as there are a lot of improvements that has been added. MacOS can be only kept on drive formatted by HFS+ or APFS file system. macOS Big Sur installation app or dmg file.USB Type-C drive (16GB+) for creating macOS installer.External drive with Thunderbolt 3 support.If you attempt to run M1 Mac from other versions of macOS bootable drive, then you should see an error message.
Notice: The approach only works for external drive with Big Sur 11.1 installed. Before we proceed, there are a couple of things you need to know about booting M1 Mac from external drive.
#External drive for mac mini m1 how to#
In this guide, we are going to show you how to run M1 Mac from an external bootable drive (SSD or USB). However, the same procedure for Apple M1 Mac is a different story. This will let you run two copies of different macOS on a single machine. On Intel-powered Macs, you can easily up boot your Mac from an external SSD drive. Also, the process of running macOS from external drive is different. The new processor promises a big performance boost when compared to the Intel counterparts, but there are some drawbacks, which lies in the fact that you cannot upgrade RAM as it is built directly into the chip.
However, the biggest change coming to the new Mac is Apple's M1 chip. Last year, Apple announced its new Mac lineup with tons of new things and improvements.