Possible to Upgrade Fusion SSD Drive?

[radioactive]

I did a DIY fusion upgrade on my 2012 Mini when it came out two years ago, upgraded the internal drive to a 7200 RPM 1TB drive, and 128 GB SSD.

Over the last two years, my drive is nearly full, and it'd be great if I could swap out to a 512 GB or 1TB SSD. Does anyone know how it's possible to break the SSD+HDD fuse and swap out the SSD for a bigger one without a full superduper backup, break, install, fuse, restore routine?

 

[Celerondon]

That Can't Happen Captain!

I did a DIY fusion upgrade on my 2012 Mini when it came out two years ago, upgraded the internal drive to a 7200 RPM 1TB drive, and 128 GB SSD.

Over the last two years, my drive is nearly full, and it'd be great if I could swap out to a 512 GB or 1TB SSD. Does anyone know how it's possible to break the SSD+HDD fuse and swap out the SSD for a bigger one without a full superduper backup, break, install, fuse, restore routine?

Nope!

Because of the way that the data is stored, that sort of component replacement is impossible. A block-level data management scheme like Fusion Drive is similar to RAID 0 in that the loss of one component renders the data unreadable. (This holds true even if that loss is intentional.)

Do that "full superduper backup, break, install, fuse, restore routine" because as Ripley said, "It's the only way to be sure."

 

[Fishrrman]

The solution is:

1. BACK UP the entire fusion drive to an external volume first. You want this to be a BOOTABLE backup.

2. Swap the SSD's.

3. Boot from the backup volume.

4. Use the appropriate commands to initialize the new SSD and re-create the fusion volume.

5. Restore the data from the backup volume to the new "fused volume".