I have an nvme Samsung evo 1tb inside a 40gbps Avolusion enclosure (I get 3 times the speed of a T7). I got an M1 Mac mini and did this exact thing for music production (Ableton and Pro Tools), photo editing and video. But having an external one over thunderbolt adds so much flexibility. The lack of a fast M.2 slot is one of my greatest frustrations with the Mini. There’s no point in spending too much on drives for external enclosures as they won’t be quicker, but they may run very hot. But the WD750 and WD550 seem to work fine, as do the sabrent gen 3.0 rocket. NVME drive compatibility is important consider in an external TB enclosure, and most manufacturers will give an indication of what they recommend and what they suggest you avoid. I have enclosures based on the JHL6340 (orico) and JHL7440 (Trebleet, but I believe this is also what the Acasis uses) and both perform amazingly well, with speeds of over 2GB/S. I also recommend looking into user-swappable enclosures. It doesn’t seem to be a compromise in any way. I did a full reinstall of 11.3 earlier this week, firstly on the internal drive, and then on one of my thunderbolt NVMe drives, and there’s no discernible performance difference between the two in use. It’s taken five months to get to this point, but it’s great. I’ve gone full thunderbolt NVMe for the primary storage on my 16GB M1 Mini, and after the release of 11.3, external booting with FileVault enabled is finally working. All depends on your file sizes, I know Photoshop shouldn't be an issue but I don't know anything about music files. If I had to re-do the purchase decision again I'd probably suck it up and get more internal space (and not be happy about it haha). Overall I say your SSD thought process is entirely reasonable and should work, but if you're viewing the Mac Mini as a long-term investment I think upgrading to the 1TB internal storage may actually be worthwhile. Now I was able to just upload and work on 1 weekend at a time, and then delete the RAW data altogether, but it's also easy to forget about doing this, and not everyone is comfortable deleting the RAW.

because I needed to start with the files on the desktop, my 512GB Mac ran out of storage quick (every weekend I was generating 100-200GB of raw GoPro footage that needed to be edited down). This kinda leads into the other pain point, storage space. It wasn't worth it, and is much more efficient to save to the desktop and then copy them to the SSD (that part was lightning fast for me) Writing a 5GB file to the Mac took maybe 10 minutes, for the SSD I can't remember the time but SIGNIFICANTLY longer.

Writing to the Mac Mini is significantly faster than writing to the external SSD (I bought a 1TB SanDisk Extreme 1050MB/s USB-C gen 3.2). Certainly not an expert, but I coach and shoot/edit GoPro footage of our tournaments.

Portable ssd for mac