Correct me if I am wrong, but isnt the Fusion drive just some RAID'ed drive?
It isn't a RAID configuration at all. The drives are "joined," but the real "magic" is how files are swapped back-and forth based on use.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isnt the Fusion drive just some RAID'ed drive?
This is really cool. He makes a good point about HFS+, though. Looking forward to seeing some solid testing numbers down the road to see if the smart caching in the Fusion drive matches up (or beats) to the caching built into firmware of similar 'hybrid' drives available from WD and others. I might just have to look into throwing something like this together in my Mac Pro.
So the headline is false. It's not Apple's Fusion Drive at all.
It should read more like "Computer Geek manages to emulate Apple's Fusion Drive in his own setup"
So the headline is false. It's not Apple's Fusion Drive at all.
It should read more like "Computer Geek manages to emulate Apple's Fusion Drive in his own setup"
Correct me if I am wrong, but isnt the Fusion drive just some RAID'ed drive?
Mac Developer - aka - he paid the $99 for Mac Developer Program.
So he has an internal SSD and an external HDD with a single drive letter, what makes that a "fusion" drive?
According to his next two posts, its looks as if it is operating at the block level.The larger question is if it operates at file-level or at the block level...
Did you RTFA? His results would indicate that there's a software layer doing some additional work here besides just managing a typical volume group. What's more, the behavior is clearly more complex than a simple caching system using the SSD. The magic behind Fusion looks to be at the OS layer itself, because he pretty much had to do no major configuration other than creating the volume grouping. His test would suggest that it would be quite easy to roll your own file-level tiering setup using just the functionality built into the OS.
His test may have been relatively simple, but it certainly showed something interesting. I would postulate that it probably rolled out with 10.8.1 or 10.8.2. The larger question is if it operates at file-level or at the block level...
So he has an internal SSD and an external HDD with a single drive letter, what makes that a "fusion" drive? Nothing! There's no proof this is what Apple calls Fusion Drive technology. The article is a fail.
P.S. There's Windows software out there that will combine various drives into a single "hybrid" volume. Does that mean that's "fusion" drive software? I think not.
That's what I was going to say. Misleading article title is misleading. It's the software that works on other Macs, not the drive itself.
Is this really exactly the same as Apple's implementation of Fusion Drive? That wasn't made clear to me by the article.
Is this really exactly the same as Apple's implementation of Fusion Drive? That wasn't made clear to me by the article.
You're missing the point. It's not the drives that are working the file management magic, it's the OS itself. His article essentially confirmed that. All he did was build a logical grouping in diskutil. The OS handled the rest, and quite seamlessly so. That's pretty cool.
Is this a stable setup? The article is very technical and doesn't really say if a non-techie could make it work safely. I notice he isn't providing any script to automate the setup process.
If by "stable" you mean supported by Apple, then no.
The article links to Apple's kb article ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US ) on Fusion. Question #2
" .... Can external USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt hard drives be added to Fusion Drive?
An external drive cannot be used as part of a Fusion Drive volume. Fusion Drive is designed to work with an internal hard disk drive and internal flash storage. ...."
Yet this is exactly what he did. There is a difference between can you create something that appears to work and a support configuration.
The utilities he is using are even present in 10.7 . Here is the man page for diskutil from 10.7
" .... CoreStorage maintains a world of virtual disks, somewhat like RAID, in which one can easily
add or remove imported backing store disks, .... "
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/diskutil.8
All of the CoreStorage commands used are present there too. So you can glob these two drives together in Lion. The file movement stuff may not work so well because HFS+ either can't get the metadata or cannot figure out just how big the "faster" area of the virtual volume is.
The config he used is likely not supported because if the USB drives is yanked then the volume could get corrupted. Apple's FAQ doesn't say you cannot but indicating this is not what it was designed for.
The same is likely true of showing up with random SSDs. It might work. It might not work. If it doesn't work it won't be a priority task to fix it. There is nothing there telling folks to cobble together volumes with random disks.
P.S. He is doing similar with layering ZFS on top of one of these volumes. ZFS wants raw, unpartitioned disks just like CoreStorage. It will "make do" with a virtual one, but you're out of the mainstream at that point.
How is that any different than what I wrote?
It isn't a RAID configuration at all. The drives are "joined," but the real "magic" is how files are swapped back-and forth based on use.
Upon stopping the process, the system automatically pushed the data back to the traditional hard drive, ...
As the system learns how you work, Fusion Drive makes your Mac experience even better.
Perhaps I misunderstood your comment, you seemed to be implying that it was the drive doing the work. Sorry if I read your comment wrong.
"It's the software that works on other Macs, not the drive itself."