Thanks, but I'm not looking at creating a Fusion drive. Just two separate drives. I just want the OS and apps on the SSD and use the HD for data storage.
The question is more about physical location and being able to boot from the SSD sitting in the caddy.
My SSD is "mounted" to the back wall of my iMac with sticky pads (included in the kit from OWC), under the optical drive and attached to the 3rd SATA port on the logic board (that last part is not as easy as it sounds as the 3rd port is on the backside of the logic board and a bugger to get to). If you are keeping your old HDD, you can boot to that and then format the SSD, install the OS on it, make it your boot drive and move over what files you need. If both are new drives, you'll need a external boot source, like a bootable thumb drive (
pretty easily done - I used option 2). If you're keeping the original HDD for storage only, you'll probably want to backup your data, reformat it and put the data only back on that drive to keep it clean.
In my case, both my drives were new, but that didn't matter as I wanted to fuse them anyway. I booted the Mac from a thumb drive and
created the fusion drive with a few simple steps through Terminal. After that, I simply re-installed my system from a Time Machine backup to the new fusion drive. I prefer the fusion approach as it means not having to worry about file management; I just let the OS handle all that in the background.
