A:Answer I’m looking at this same situation as a possibility for myself, but haven’t received my new iPad Pro yet. I am going to throw out this as a possible workaround that may wor for Procreate users. When Procreate opens a file, it tries to create an editable file in the same location as the source file, and this is likely where the problem lies. Procreate may not be allowed to work with the external SSD freely because of security limitations in iPadOS. You can likely save or export the file to the external SSD, but you will almost certainly need to import the file back to the internal storage to work with it. This is almost certainly down to the sandboxing elements of iPadOS, which are much more extreme than MacOS. The actual hardware is fully capable of laptop/desktop style use and support of Thunderbolt compliant SSDs. Apple locks out higher level access to external devices because the iPad is an ultraportable and concealable device: i.e. an incredibly big security risk, as both a target and a tool. It’s gonna take some time for them to develop secure workarounds for external devices.
In the meantime, as a workaround, try importing the file from the external SSD in Procreate. If that fails, try using the Files app to copy the file from the external SSD to somewhere on the internal storage, then import from that file back into Procreate. Either method should reduce the external access to a file read, which shouldn’t be a problem.
