What Happens If You Make a Fusion's Hardisk an External Drive?

[Alvin777]

Hello MacRumors friends.


What happens if you remove the hardisk of a Fusion drive and made it into an external drive? Would your User folders be there (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc.) and will it be readable?

I plan to remove both the Apple SSD and the hardisk of the 2TB fusion drive in a Late 2015 5K iMac and the install with proper adapter a 1TB NVME SSD and reinstall MacOS Big Sur and then put the 2TB hardisk on an external USB enclosure and manually just get the most important files there by dragging (copy-paste) onto the new 1TB NVME SSD.

Thank you.

God bless, Revelation 21:4

 

[Weaselboy]

By doing what you describe you will "break" the Fusion drive and no data will be readable.

What you can do is install the new SSD then install the OS on there and migrate over your data from a Time Machine backup. Then after that you could out the old hard drive in an enclosure and format it then use for storage.