External Hard drive use with Mac Mini

You can, but I wouldn't recommend it. Yes, you could off-load your Home Folder to it but it over-complicates things. You can alternatively store singular data on it, but if you were to do that, there should be redundancy. Ideally look at some low-cost RAIDs either from LaCie or G-Tech. Also have another USB hard drive setup as the Time Machine backup to the internal SSD.

Make it 2 drives. One needs to be a backup of the other. Trusting

your digital data to a single device is an accident waiting to happen.

As far as what goes where, internally, keep your home folder there

and only put additional things that you really require. Items like iTunes

libraries, Photos libraries, and any other media which are generally the

biggest space hogs, put them on the external and anything else that you

typically do not need daily access to.

See this article for an easy solution. Apple has made this very easy and painless to do and its what I did for my wife's work computer when she outgrew her mini's internal drive. Another good solution is to purchase a Thunderbolt external drive. Thunderbolt's speed would allow you to put everything on it.

Don't forget, if you do use the external for your home account you'll need a second external for backups. And yes, TM can back up both the internal drive and the external home drive.

give you lots of flexibility. if you set it up you can even boot that Mac off it.