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I have finally gotten around to upgrading my internal drives on my Mac.  I have never done this before, so I am looking for some advice.

1) I plan to install my OS and apps on an internal SSD and place all my other data on a separate internal HDD.  What is the best way to transfer just my data to the new drive?  Apple has a migration assistant utility – would this do the trick?  I suppose a manual transfer to the new drive would work but would migration assistant be faster, and additionally I am worried about missing something.

2) I also plan to have a second drive installed as a backup.  I imagine from a performance perspective, placing this drive in one of the internal bays on my MP would be best, but I worry about cooling (I am upgrading to 4 Tb drives).  Would it be better for me to place this backup drive in an external housing with a large fan?  FWIW, I also expect to upgrade to a USB 3, so I don't think speed, should I connect via an external drive, will be an issue.

TIA.

Migration assistant will transfer everything from the old HD to the SSD. You would then need to move your Pictures, Movies, Documents, Music, etc over to the HD. You will then want to add these locations to the Favorites section of the sidebar of the Finder and get rid of the old ones. No problem putting the backup drive externally and connecting it with USB 3. That's plenty fast enough for backup as the USB 3 interface is faster than traditional HDs.

My approach would be to clone the old HD to the SSD rather than go through migration assistant and then do what I said above to get the files onto the data drive.

Thanks EJ.