I have a late 2012 Mac mini that came with a 500 GB HDD installed from the factory. It's almost full so I want to upgrade it to a 1 TB Fusion Drive, as the cost for a 1 TB SSD is still steep. The Mac mini is currently running 10.8.5 (I'm not sure if it's even compatible with Fusion Drives) and I'm going to upgrade the machine to 10.10.
Do I need to do anything in particular to use a 3rd party Fusion / Hybrid Drive?
In the past when I've moved to a new drive, I just put the new drive in an enclosure and then backup the old drive (whilst still inside the machine) using Carbon Copy Cloner. Will this work with a Fusion / Hybrid Drive? As I guess the OS files need to be saved to the SSD part of the drive.
For reference I was thinking of using a Seagate SSHD drive like this Seagate SSHD Laptop.
Best Answer
No, there is nothing special you need to do.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, the way that hybrid drives work is that they monitor the data being read from the drive and, over time, they identify what files are regularly read from the drive. The drive then caches the most frequently accessed files to the high speed NAND flash memory.
The net result is that hybrid hard drives blend HDD capacity with SSD speeds.
A couple of years ago I actually installed a 1TB Seagate hybrid drive into a 15" MacBook Pro (late 2008) model and the improvement was amazing. Well worth it in my situation!
In terms of how you go about doing this, it's really a matter of personal choice. I've used Carbon Copy Cloner, Time Machine and others. In recent years I've just used Time Machine to manage all my backups and then restore data that way. I also use two Time Machine backup drives for each computer.
Hope this helps.