Efficiency advantages of an internal 2tb rather than 1tb ssd in M1 Max Studio?

I’ve been operating that way for a while, with 1TB storage on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro plus an affordable external SSD for video caches and scratch files, small and bus-powered so it can travel with the laptop. That does work pretty well for keeping space free on the boot volume, and avoided the high cost of a 2TB internal storage upgrade. I mostly run Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.

 

I'm also considering moving my user folder to the external SSD, but rumblings on the internet make me think that apple may break that workflow.

By @Michael Grenadier

I just read the blog post Freeing Space on Your Boot Disk by the great Howard Oakley (his blog is worth following for unusually intelligent Mac advice), where he does say that relocating the Home folder to another volume is now risky enough to avoid trying.

Well, for future reference, I thought I would post here what I ended up doing. I went with the 1 TB internal SSD, and have augmented it with a couple of fast external SSD's. It is very fast, I have no complaints at all. I do see that in the future there might be a case for 2 TB internal, but that ship has sailed for me and I'm not looking back. I am photo, video, and audio editing.

fwiw, I recently bought an entry level macstudio and don't have any issues so far with the 500 gig internal ssd.  I've bought a 1 tb external SSD that I keep permanently connected for all my caches, dropbox folder, etc. and keep an eye on the available space on the boot drive on a regular basis.   I'm also considering moving my user folder to the external SSD, but rumblings on the internet make me think that apple may break that workflow.  I always try and keep all my media on external ssds with a backup on a cheap physical usb3 drive that I update every day or so using carbon copy cloner...  For someone who bought an early avid where a 1 gig scsi external drive was a couple of grand, I'm in hard drive heaven...

I've come to prefer 2TB, even if usually working from an external drive.

I just install Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects without worrying much about the Scratch Disk settings and get to work.

I've come to really like the Clean Drive option of Parallels Toolbox for freeing up anywhere from 150GB to 250GB of drive space every few months.