Running OSX & Live from External SSD

[Defacto]

Hopefully someone can shine a bit of light on this for me please…

I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Pro with 256gb internal drive running Cubase and Live, with an ever growing plugin library the internal drive is close to full most the time (projects / samples / kontakt library’s etc all on external ssd).

As the internal can’t be upgraded I was wondering if the following was an acceptable solution ?

Create a bootable System drive on a 2tb fast SSD (Samsung T7 or equivalent ) running Ventura and boot from this external SSD and the install Live and Cubase etc along with all plugins etc.
Obviously this will allow me to have a huge amount of space to play with for a music based MacBook with the advantage of being able to boot to the internal drive to use things like email / photoshop and other admin type tasks.
The idea of a dedicated DAW system (2TB external SSD) and a dedicated Photoshop system (256GB internal) is very appealing.
I have already created the external bootable SSD with OSX Ventura on and noticed that it hides the internal drive when booted off external which is great so there is no confusion when installing software or system files etc.
On the surface this sounds like a perfect and cost effective solution to get over the restrictive space on a MacBook, so can anyone chip in and let me know if this is a workable solution.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions or advice…

[[jur]]

That's not Live or Cubase applications per se that need space, but their libraries and projects.
So you'd rather keep any application on your machine in the appropriate Applications Finder folder, but set their content on the external drive.
I don't know how it's done in Cubase, but in Live just go to the Preferences and you'll find options to set custom paths for Live's Packs, your User Library, the temporary recordings. And also create your parent projects/sets folder on the external drive too.
And keep booting on your internal drive, your life will probably feel better.

[Defacto]

Thank you for your reply.

I have everything pointing to and external already but now limited on space.

Is there any difference between the OS booting from external other than a small difference in speed ? The space gain would make all the difference and i like the idea of keeping audio and photoshop as 2 different configurations.

Regards

[lincolnkid]

Your 256GB internal disk is big enough for the OS and applications, but put everything else that you can on the external disk. You'll find the performance of the internal disk on the M1 is a lot faster than an external disk.