I have a Mac Mini (M1) that is telling me that I am running out of disk space. I have already off loaded much of my data files but wondered if there was a way to use a USB drive for the VSTs that Dorico uses. (I have a large SWAM library too!)
TIA — Jim
You can use an USB Drive, but for the Audio samples I highly recommend a Thunderbolt / USB 4 SSD, the USB-A ports (and also USB <4 on the Thunderbolt ports) are too slow.
I’m using a ZIKE case with a Lexar NM790 SSD on an iMac M1
Okay, thanks for the advice on TB4. I may have to get a new one instead of repurposing one I have laying around!
So do I use the Library Manager to move everything over? (This is a part of dorico that I haven’t needed to explore yet!)
Most sample players can be set to look for the samples at a given location. Steinberg Library Manager app controls the HALion samples.
If you have other players: SINE, ARIA, Opus, Kontakt, etc, then you’ll need to look at their instructions for moving samples and pointing the player to them.
Pretty much any drive will be fast enough. You could probably even use Mechanical hard drives.
Yes, for the HALion stuff. It’s pretty easy. For each package click on Move, then select the destination.
I recommend also to create a reasonable folder structure rather than having a mess of files in one folder
On an M1 with presumably 8 GB RAM the drive cannot be fast enough 
I had some dropouts with a mechanical HD
Thank you both! I will play around with one that I have sitting around to get a feel for all that is needed. If I need to upgrade to a faster one, it should be fairly easy to transfer to the new one.
I agree. Vendors tend to strongly recommend SSD drives and warn against mechanical ones. particularly with the more professional level libraries with a lot of articulations. Starter ones will probably still be OK (after all I ran things like the VSL Special Edition on one back in the day)
Yes, admittedly, an HDD might not be up to it, particularly if you can’t buffer into RAM, which most players do.
But for audio you don’t need super amazing state of the art bandwidth. Certainly any SSD will be more than sufficient.
Have a look at this Mac Mini docks with sd video. Has anyone tried these NVMe SSD’s. I understand that one of the shown devices can have an integrated SD card of 8T. I presently have a huge OWC 2x 4T to get this capacity.
@mavros Thanks for that but I’m afraid it’s a little overkill for me! While the video shows an M4 which, as I’m sure you know, are a different size format than the M1, I have seen the Satechi and a few others that are nice additions to the M1 Mini. In the back of my mind I have a pipe dream of upgrading to an M4 of some flavor — maybe even a Studio. But that would have to be justifiable to my wife! (These are just “toys” after all!) So frugality is the plan for now.
If I truly need to get an external SSD, then maybe I’ll look at a Satechi or something. (If I continue to be frustrated with Windows, I might even repurpose the SSD memory from that!) 
