Terry Q Brinkworth wrote:
there’s nothing like 20/20 hindsight is there?
There's the next best thing - correcting problems.
At a bare minimum, you need to erase that drive and start over. Then, you can decide what level of pain you want to inflict upon yourself.
1) Least painful. Setup computer with default settings using internal boot drive. Store large files on the external. If necessary, you can move your Photos library, and maybe your Music library to the external too.
2) Moderate pain. You can enable ownership on the external drive and use it to store your entire home directory. You will need a backup user account that is stored internally for when the external flakes out and takes all your data with it.
3) Most pain. You've done some of this already. You would just need to do it correctly. Setup your external as the boot volume, but don't do any extra partitioning on it. Just let the OS do what it wants.
Any option above will definitively solve the problem. Option 1 provides the best performance, most reliability, most daily annoyance. Option 2 is good performance, good reliability, and relatively little daily annoyance. Option 3 is worst performance, worst reliability, and least daily annoyance. Choose your poison. Decide later whether the hassles were worth the money saved in the long run.