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ignatius345

macrumors 604
Original poster
Aug 20, 2015
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hi folks,

I'm about to crack open my iMac 5K and put in a new SSD, as my current Fusion Drive is dying. Using a couple different utilities, I'm seeing massive wear levels on the blade SSD part of the Fusion Drive, so I'm about to put in a 2TB SATA SSD. I got a repair kit from iFixit and will give it a go in the next few days.

What's the best and easiest way to seamlessly keep things working just as they are, with the existing user accounts and everything, once I'm done?

Should I clone my current Fusion Drive onto the new SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner, then install it into the new machine? Any pitfalls there?

Or would it make more sense to install MacOS onto that new drive and then use Migration Assistant to bring over the user accounts from a separate CCC clone of the drive?
 
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Should I clone my current Fusion Drive onto the new SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner, then install it into the new machine? Any pitfalls there?

That would easiest and pretty straightforward.

Or would it make more sense to install MacOS onto that new drive and then use Migration Assistant to bring over the user accounts from a separate CCC clone of the drive?

That is just extra work vs the clone method with no better end result.
 
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OK, I put the SSD I'm going to use into an external enclosure, made the CCC clone and then successfully booted from it (for now, until I get around to opening up my iMac and installing it properly).

All is working fine so far, but App Store shows tons of apps that I own as "in the cloud" when they're in fact installed and working. Here are just a few of them below. Anyone know how to fix this and make App Store realize that these apps are actually installed?

iMac 2020-04-05 at 9.03.41 PM.png
 
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Hmmm... I've note seen that happen before. Are you sure you are logged in to the App Store with the same account as before?
 
Hmmm... I've note seen that happen before. Are you sure you are logged in to the App Store with the same account as before?
Oh yeah, for sure, same Apple ID. And if I hit the download button in App Store, it goes through the circular download animation and then shows as "installed" (even though it already was). The apps in question work fine either way, but this isn't ideal because I want to make sure I see updates properly.

The only thing I can think of is that the cloned boot drive has a different name than the original -- but in my experience you can change the name of your boot drive in the Finder more or less whenever you want and it doesn't seem to affect much.
 
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