Originally Posted by joemikeb
... I am confident in my conclusion "...it is not difficult to create a bootable external drive for M1 macs given the right combination of connecting media, drive media, and installer", or perhaps I should have been more emphatic in expressing my caveat. 🤷‍♂️
Perhaps that statement is more apropos than I thought at the time I wrote it. Since then I have found booting from the drives I previously created was a sometimes thing. Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn't. And I was still trying to figure out the problem with the Samsung SSD. My configuration since the beginning has been the Samsung drive connected to an OWC Thunderbolt 4 hub which in turn is connected to one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the M1 Mac mini.

Purely on a hunch, I disconnected the OWC Thunderbolt 4 hub and connected the Samsung directly to the Thunderbolt 4 port on the Mac mini and 💥SUCCESS! 🎉 I was easily able to create a bootable image on the Samsung drive, and reliably reboot from it multiple times. Even better, it is within a hairs breadth of being as fast as the internal drive. I reiterate, "...it is not difficult easy to create a bootable external drive SSD for M1 macs given the right combination of connecting media, drive media, and installer"

I am planning a long chat with OWC Tech Support tomorrow.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein