The New File System and new disks

[NMBob]

I have Catalina on a 2012 mini and it is just too slow. I want to replace the 1.5TB spinning disk with a 1TB SSD, and then make the spinner the second drive for the data. I think I have a cable for that somewhere. Will something like Carbon Copy Cloner be able to figure that out? I have no idea what is going on with disk drives anymore, and from looking at Disk Utility it doesn't either. It used to be so simple. Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

You can do what you want, there's nothing complicated about this.

Be aware that if you use CCC, you will need to create TWO CCC clones:
- One for the internal SSD
and
- Another for the data HDD.

Nothing difficult about that, either.
I have many drives cloned to many backups.

One other thing:
I recommend that for a "data only drive", you leave the HDD formatted to HFS+. That's "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format".

 

[NMBob]

Roger on the two-fer cloning. Right now it just looks like I have two drives, but there is only one HDD and I wasn't sure if that would play out correctly when I clone to setup the new drive.

Do these two volumes dynamically resize? The non-data one is about 11GB. What if I add a bunch of applications? Does it automatically adjust? If you go down through the directory structure they look the same and it's hard to tell what is on which. I gotta go read a good article somewhere.

Oh good on the HFS+. Will do. I figured the OS would just change it for me...for my own safety.

Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

When you clone one drive to another drive, the SIZE differences between the two drives is of no importance.

Only THE DATA is cloned, not "the drive size".

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Roger on the two-fer cloning. Right now it just looks like I have two drives, but there is only one HDD and I wasn't sure if that would play out correctly when I clone to setup the new drive.

Do these two volumes dynamically resize? The non-data one is about 11GB. What if I add a bunch of applications? Does it automatically adjust? If you go down through the directory structure they look the same and it's hard to tell what is on which. I gotta go read a good article somewhere.

Oh good on the HFS+. Will do. I figured the OS would just change it for me...for my own safety.

Thanks!

It seemed to me that you had cloned the HDD to the SSD.
You can change the name of one disk, then open "About this Mac" to verify the type of each disk.
After that, you can move/clean the data.
Or, you can also wipe out the HDD, and make a Fusion disk, let the Mac OS arrange your data between the SSD and the HDD, if the HDD is not too old.