Moving to a New Mac from larger one (of sorts...)

[gershwin]

Hi,
I've just bought a mac mini. It has a 1 terabyte drive. I bought a 240gb SSD for it. That will go in with the existing drive, it will be the drive my operating system works off etc etc. My current mac is a macbook pro with a 750gb hard drive which has about 650gb of stuff on it including an iphoto library of 200+gb and likewise an itunes library of 200+gb.

I have a bootable clone of it all on an external harddrive via SuperDuper!

My question is this:
What is the best way to move onto the new set up? The issue is, I guess, I want to have some stuff, apps and the like on the small 240gb, but the big libraries of media on the 1 terabyte hard drive.

I don't want to mess this up and have issues with itunes/iphoto asking me to locate files because of separate locations and also things like folder permissions mucking up.

Thanks.

[mclbruce]

I would be very tempted to set up a Fusion drive with your two new drives. It's not supported by Apple, but it would make life simpler for you. Once set up, install a clean version of OS X on it and run migration assistant against your old drive.

This is not for beginners, but if you've been around Macs for a while it may be worth considering.

[anthlover]

Here is some info from Macworld on going the roll your own fusion route...

http://www.macworld.com/article/2014...ion-drive.html

It is what you sort of set your self up for I would also remind you to keep multiple separate physical back ups, even off site like crash plan.
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The old style way would be to install the OS and Apps on the SSD and keep all your data on HD, but then you will simply copy all your pics and music etc. and point everything to the correct place. You can not do a simple clone to the SSD, of course though you can to the internal.

[DeltaMac]

I also like the idea of a fusion drive, particularly on your mini, where it's not too difficult to have both the hard drive and the SSD installed internally.
You don't have to decide where your files go - the fusion drive decides if files and apps should be on the faster SSD drive, or stored on the larger space of the spinning hard drive.

[anthlover]

Yeah its pretty slick from what I have read and looks to you and the system has a single very fast volume. Naturally a pure SSD is going to be faster if you had one that was large enough, but the fusion drive comes close from the limited bench marks I have seen. Everyone's use case is different.

I just went all SSD but my Dataset was 1/2 your size around 300GB so I could comfortably fit in a 512 SSD with plenty of room to spare. From your description of nearly 700GB even subtracting your music library would not comfortably fit on 512GB. They do make some 3/4 TB to 1TB SSD but there pretty much 1k and up. Of course you could simply run even 2 moderately priced 500GB SSD in a raid 0 configuration, say to Samsung 840 SSDs and you be out the door for $700, still pricy though.

*Delta do you know if the SSDs set up with core storage have Trim enabled? I imagine it might for Apple ones, but it would be good to turn off I understand for non Apple SSD.

[NaOH]

Quote: Originally Posted by gershwin My question is this: What is the best way to move onto the new set up? The issue is, I guess, I want to have some stuff, apps and the like on the small 240gb, but the big libraries of media on the 1 terabyte hard drive.

If you don't feel comfortable with the Fusion Drive-style setup—I would have some concerns since there isn't any long-term information on the method and since OS updates may affect a non-Apple-sanctioned setup—iTunes and iPhoto allow you to set where the media files are stored. You could simply put the music and photos on the platter drive and keep everything else on the SSD.

I don't use iPhoto, but I do essentially that with my music. My machine runs off a 96GB SSD in the ExpressCard slot and all the music is on the internal 500GB platter drive. I've never had an issue from this arrangement.

[mclbruce]

Quote: Originally Posted by NaOH If you don't feel comfortable with the Fusion Drive-style setup—I would have some concerns since there isn't any long-term information on the method and since OS updates may affect a non-Apple-sanctioned setup—iTunes and iPhoto allow you to set where the media files are stored. You could simply put the music and photos on the platter drive and keep everything else on the SSD.

Good points, NaOH. An option-click on iTunes or iPhoto in the dock allows you to easily point the app to an external library. So, you could:
Copy the itunes folder and iPhoto Library file to the HDD,
Erase them from the backup HD, and
Clone the rest of the backup drive to the SSD.
Start the mini, do the option-open trick once in iTunes and iPhoto and you should be good to go.