Fusion drive to external ssd questions

[jnowakphoto]

Hello. Plan on moving my late 2013 iMac (fusion drive) had to an external ssd boot disk and have couple questions

1. Do I need to do anything else besides formatting the new ssd to apfs, cloning drive via carbon cloner, then once done booting off the new ssd?

2. Once up an running on external ssd can I simply format the internal drive and use that for backup or file storage?

Thanks

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Fusion Drives should not be running APFS so suggest leaving external HFS until such time as Mojave is released late September/October and reports indicate it will run APFS on the Fusion so then do the external to that fiue system.

 

[Fishrrman]

My advice and my opinion only:

Format the external SSD to HFS+ (NOT APFS), and then "clone the internal over" using CCC.

Once you have the SSD running "as you like it", you can then erase the internal fusion drive and set it up as you wish.

On your iMac, doesn't the fusion drive have a 128gb SSD portion?
If it does, you might consider "splitting" the fusion drive into "standalone" SSD and HDD drives.

I would then benchmark the SSD using "AJA System Test Lite".
You -may- find that the internal SSD runs considerably faster (as a standalone drive) than does the external SSD.

In that case, I would consider "cloning back" the "essentials" to boot from, and run from the internal SSD.
By "essentials", I mean:
- OS
- applications
- account (home folder)
But.. leave "large libraries" (music, movies, pics) on the external or internal HDD.

 

[jnowakphoto]

Thank you both.

 

[ChrisChaval]

I wrote about my experiences with setting up an external SSD as startup disk in this post:

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ork-in-real-life.2125789/page-2#post-26220854