Splitting 27” iMac Fusion Drive - how best to setup drives

[icemantx]

I have a late 2014 27” iMac with a 3TB Fusion drive and I am going to split the drives up to now have a new Samsung 860 SSD and keep the 128gb Flash drive that came with the iMac.

How would you recommend I setup the new iMac from a time machine backup?

I have seen other posts about how to replace the HDD and split the Fusion apart so no immediate questions on that. Where I have some questions is how to best restore the Fusion backup to still use the 128GB flash drive along with the new SSD.

Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

How I'd set it up:

Internal blade 128gb SSD would become my primary boot drive:
- OS
- applications
- basic accounts (no "large libraries")
It will be the fastest of the two, so I would want it to be the boot drive.

Samsung SSD:
- large libraries (such as pics, movies, music, etc.)
- other file storage (items accessed infrequently)

And also:
An EXTERNAL backup drive which can be platter-based or another SSD.
Then PARTITION IT and do the following:
- CLONED BACKUP of boot drive (one ALWAYS wants to have a SECOND "bootable to the finder" drive within reach)
- backup of the Samsung SSD (again, I prefer cloned).

And perhaps even:
A SECOND external backup which serves as your "off-site" backup.

 

[icemantx]

Thinking about upgrading the blade to 2TB instead of or in addition to the HDD to SSD. Is it worth upgrading both? Would you use the SSD as a time machine backup or maybe a clone of the blade? Or just leave the HDD and use for things like movie files?