[bradch00]

I have been booting off external SSD drives for years, due to testing. I like to have a “production” system with only GA software and plug-ins, plus at least one or two for test development and Q&A. My old 2014 iMac worked well for this as does the new Apple Studio Max picked up last spring. Currently I am still using SSD my old Thunderbolt enclosures through an adapter, but have order an OWC M.2 and 8TB of drives over the weekend. Now when I do add another system, I always build it from scratch, even on the old iMac. Buy decent quality SSDs. I have been running on Samsung, Crucial and Angelbird since 2015 without a single failure. (Angelbird was because it was difficult to properly configure non-Apple branded SSD at one time….)