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I have a 2012 Mac Mini with a 1TB Fusion drive. The noise of the spinning disk has been increasing lately and I want to replace it with a Crucial MX300 1TB SSD.

Carbon Copy Cloner makes a complete image of my machine nightly. Can I use the latest clone and restore it to the SSD? Is it advised or would the removal of the Fusion drive require a clean install of macOS (Sierra)? I was wondering if the boot files would be different from using a Fusion drive, for example, or if anything would need a change in some settings files.

I seem to remember that the version of OS X Yosemite was a little bit different between my Mini and my MacBook Air and that was due to the Fusion drive (couldn't download OS X on the Mini and boot it from a USB drive on the Air).

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    Just curious: what stops you from trying? – techraf Jan 11 '17 at 13:17
  • @techraf: I'm working. A full reinstall (lots and lots of packages) would require much more time than a clone and would need to be planned in advance rather than an overnight copy :-) – ilovebigmacs Jan 11 '17 at 13:21
  • I don't understand your English. You replied that: "cloning does not take much time and effort" to a question: "what stops you from trying cloning". – techraf Jan 11 '17 at 13:29
  • try this : discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4741 – enzo Jan 11 '17 at 14:13
  • @techraf restoring a clone is passive work that can be done at night. Installing manually is not. Trying means switching the Fusion drive for the SSD. If restoring the clone doesn't work, I'll have to install things manually. Clearer? – ilovebigmacs Jan 11 '17 at 15:14
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In answer to your question: YES.

By way of explanation... CCC makes a copy of the file system, which is independent of what physical drives the file system is on. for example you could make a clone of a boot drive on a RAID-5 array and then restore it to a single drive with no problems.

The file system doesn't change just because it is on a different kind of physical media.

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  • IIRC this is not entirely correct. If the disk image is too big you can't simply restore it to a smaller disk. E.g. cloning a 1.12 TB Fusion drive (with 500 GB of data) to a 860 GB SSD won't work with the image method because the image is too large. You may mount the image and rsync the content to the new SSD though. But I might be wrong. – klanomath Jan 11 '17 at 14:47
  • Thanks @Steve. So you confirm that macOS is the same version for a Fusion drive Mac Mini as the one for a non-Fusion drive one? – ilovebigmacs Jan 11 '17 at 15:16
  • @ilovebigmacs The only difference in older OS X versions between Fusion and non-Fusion env was the binary of the app "Disk Utility". – klanomath Jan 11 '17 at 15:58

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