
But reports indicate that you may not be able to just change the formatting on an existing drive, as invisible partitions used for purposes related to booting from an Intel drive from a previous macOS installation on the drive could cause issues. To use Big Sur, the drive has to be formatted as APFS. I opted to buy a relatively inexpensive 500GB SSD for now (about $75) so I could have a bootable option. (That sounds like a mouthful, but you can search on that to find compatible SSDs.) OWC says it supports current capacities up to 4TB, and is designed to support future higher capacities, too. You can purchase higher capacities, or just get its Envoy Express enclosure, which runs $79, to which you can add any SSD that’s designed for the 2280 M.2 NVMe standard. With an SSD inside, OWC charges $199 for 480GB and $299.75 for 1TB. (Some people have apparently been able to get a USB 3 drive to work for this, but no one has narrowed down which ones or why, so it’s impossible to recommend it as a course of action.) However, Other World Computing offers a specific line of lower-cost, bus-powered Thunderbolt 3 SSDs. Thunderbolt 3 is generally reserved for high-performance drives and arrays of drives used for graphics and video purposes. Then the system will launch from that device every time.Most inexpensive external drives use a flavor of USB 3 to connect over USB-C.

unless you keep the boot media in the USB port. That won’t be a problem, since the BIOS will move to the next device in the boot sequence.

In the future, your computer will first check the USB port for boot media when starting up. If you do nothing, your computer will go to the next device in the boot sequence list, which will likely be your hard drive.
HOW TO RESTART A MAC FROM EXTERNAL DISC SOFTWARE
The boot order tells the machine which devices to search for the software needed to launch the computer and the priority each device in that search. That’s because the BIOS settings include the boot sequence the machine follows when starting up.
HOW TO RESTART A MAC FROM EXTERNAL DISC PC
Starting your PC using USB rescue media is not difficult, although it first requires an adjustment in the BIOS (Basic Input Output System).
