New user here. I made the mistake of buying an iMac with a fusion drive. The HDD portion of this is a complete disaster in terms of responsiveness, and I want to swap it for a SSD. I don’t have an issue with doing the hardware part of this, the issues are:
Handling whatever hardware/software the ‘Fusion Drive’ is as a bridge between the SDD on the m’board and the HDD volume, so that the new hardware ‘just works’.
That I have a Bootcamp Windows install and am hoping WinClone will take care of this part of the hardware upgrade migration, as a deferred, ‘second step’, having used…
Carbon Copy Cloner to back up and then reinstate my present Mac OS Catilina.
Some questions:
Can WinClone therefore do the job wanted of it? - ‘copy’ an existing Windows 10 Bootcamp partition, and then ‘add it back’ to Catalina, once the hardware upgrade has been completed AND Catalina has also been restored?
Are there any issues with working with the Fusion drive architecture, and/or eliminating it?
Are there any issues/conflicts in between how CCC goes about doing it’s thing in migrating Catalina, and subsequently WinClone restoring the Windows partition?
Is there are hardware/firmware/software issues/conflicts with making changes to a given iMac’s Fusion drive that determine whether I swap out the existing HDD for an SSD, or as I would like to, replace the existing NVMe SSD with a 2TB one from OWC, and reconfiguring the present HDD as a separate ‘internal’ external storage drive, essentially?
How would I do ‘restore’ Catalina while ‘scrapping’ the Fusion drive, and reconfiguring the existing HDD as a separate drive?
Lastly, of the options WinClone gives for ‘Capturing’, which of ‘create an image from volume’ and ‘volume to volume cloning’ is appropriate for my stated needs? My impression is that it is the former - what is suitable storage? A USB3 memory stick, an external drive…?
The first step would be to verify that the 3rd party SSD successfully boots Windows prior to migrating the boot camp partition. I would use Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows and verify the new SSD actually boots Windows successfully without any driver issues.
Yes, if the SSD supports booting Windows and Windows has the correct drivers.
3rd party SSDs sometimes have issues booting Windows.
No.
3rd party SSDs sometimes have issues booting Windows.
You can definitely split the fusion drive into SSD + hard drive, but that is unsupported by apple and not done a lot these days since the SSD is pretty small.
I would create an image and save locally, then copy to an HFS+ formatted external drive.
You should also consider selling the iMac and purchasing one that has a built in SSD. Not sure that is a possibility, but worth considering. Also, if it is within 14 days of purchase, you can return it to apple and get one with an SSD.