Has anyone turned a Fusion Drive into an external drive?

FWIW and IMHO, Mike's suggestion is just as fast and probably the better of the two.

All you really need to do, is access your User Music, Movie and Photo libraries on the 3TB and the OS will put anything added into that location.

The only draw back that I can remember back when I first did that, was merging user libraries if you had started adding to the user libraries on the new iMac's SSD.

for that see Combine two+ Users Accounts on the same machine

Did you remove both components of the fusion drive? A fusion drive is comprised of a spinning hard drive and an SSD which is mounted on the back side of the logic board. In orcpder to recreate a fusion setup youd need an external that will connect to an MSATA blade type SSD and a convential SATA drive.....or two seperate externals.

yellow05gt wrote:

So a little back story. I broke my old Late 2012 iMac with a 3tb Fusion Drive, and instead of fixing it I bought a Late 2015 5K iMac with a 512gb SSD. So now I took the Fusion drive out of my old machine and want to turn it into an external HDD. I bought the startech.com 3.1 enclosure to put it in.

If I understand your question correctly, you what to create a Fusion setup between the 512GB SSD in the new iMac and the 2012 iMac's 3TB HDD in a 3.5" 3.1 StarTech enclosure....?

Is it possible to restore the Fusion with a backup and use the Fusion as my boot drive? I want to do this because my backups from my old iMac are roughly 1.5tb and that is obviously too big for the internal SSD.

Thanks in advance!

I have never setup or tested it that way myself, but in theory it should work as well or better than the *other way round.

*(generally folks do it with the HDD in the computer and SSD in a USB 3, FireWire or Thunderbolt external)

For some tips, take some time to study the following articles,

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-how-to-create-and-disable-a-fusion-d rive/

http://www.macworld.com/article/2014011/storage-drives/how-to-make-your-own-fusi on-drive.html

and any others that you find doing a web search.

Additionally to prevent any drive confusion or mix-ups during the Fusion set up. It would wise to disconnect all of your other drives including the backup drive until you actually need to restore from it.

It's a 7200rpm drive, but after reading den.theds replay I went back and reread your question and I think he's on the right track and I misunderstood. Was recreating the fusion drive using the old spinner and the new SSD what you had in mind?

Another option would be to just have the OS and your applications on the internal SSD and all pf your libraries and data on the 3Tb external. I have a setup similar except I installed an SSD in the optical ay and use the existing internal hard drive dor data and libraries.

I used this article when I set mine up http://mattgemmell.com/using-os-x-with-an-ssd-plus-hdd-setup/

As always make sure you have a current, working backup before modifying anything.

Good one Mike, I was reading and just about to post that very same link. 😉