Just wanted to thank everyone for the instructions. I have just set up a Fusion drive on my 2010 MBP with an Intel 120GB SSD and a WD 600GB HDD. So far so good!
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Apple's New Fusion Drive Works on Older Macs
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Haven't seen anybody complaining about Apple's price for Fusion Drive.
I think $250 for 128GB is pretty outrageous.
Does anybody know any adaptors for these "blade SSD"s that new macs use to use them in 2.5" or 3.5" sata slot?
I was thinking to get one to my old MP and after few years move it to my MBP and after that maybe some new mac that uses these blades...
I think $250 for 128GB is pretty outrageous.
Does anybody know any adaptors for these "blade SSD"s that new macs use to use them in 2.5" or 3.5" sata slot?
I was thinking to get one to my old MP and after few years move it to my MBP and after that maybe some new mac that uses these blades...
Do I remember it right that someone said you could fuse 3 drive together? If so, it makes it an interesting option for me for the 21", versus the 27".
I need more than 1TB of storage, but if I could get the 21" with the 1TB, unfuse them, and then recreate it with the internal SSD, 1TB HDD, and a thunderbolt 1TB drive, that would make a wicked option.
I need more than 1TB of storage, but if I could get the 21" with the 1TB, unfuse them, and then recreate it with the internal SSD, 1TB HDD, and a thunderbolt 1TB drive, that would make a wicked option.
Working great for me here, no problems at all. I don't have a real Fusion drive to compare with though.
The 256GB units average $500 as an upgrade price, so they're at least staying true to form.
...you probably don't want to do that...
In general, it's a very bad idea to try to build a multi-disk volume with external drives. If any external becomes unplugged, nothing will be accessible.
With a T-Bolt daisy chain, it would be necessary to power down in order to connect or remove other T-Bolt devices (unless you keep the drive as the first T-Bolt device, and it's guaranteed that adding or breaking downstream T-Bolt connections will not affect upstream devices).
One exception to this is a multi-drive volume that's contained within a single expansion cabinet. That won't have the issue of "part" of the volume disappearing.
In general, it's a very bad idea to try to build a multi-disk volume with external drives. If any external becomes unplugged, nothing will be accessible.
With a T-Bolt daisy chain, it would be necessary to power down in order to connect or remove other T-Bolt devices (unless you keep the drive as the first T-Bolt device, and it's guaranteed that adding or breaking downstream T-Bolt connections will not affect upstream devices).
One exception to this is a multi-drive volume that's contained within a single expansion cabinet. That won't have the issue of "part" of the volume disappearing.
I may have made a mistake, I set up a Fusion Drive in my MBP, and I like it.
I had already ordered a SSD (OWC 240 Gb), a mount for the optical bay, and a 1 Tb notebook drive, but they were supposed to go into different Macs. The articles about 'DIY Fusion Drives' showed up just a few days after they arrived. I thought that I would just give it a try, to see what was up. I followed the instructions in Steins JollyJinx blog, and the setup was pretty straightforward. My only question was about the 'logical drive' size. Was it supposed to be the size of the HD, or of the HD and SSD combined?? I chose the size of the HD.
It has been running for a couple of days, and so far, it has worked great, and I am impressed. I do admit, that the amount of data that I have in it, it probably is all on the SSD at this point. I have been mostly just trying it out and not putting any critical stuff on it, but this is a VERY tempting way to go...
I had already ordered a SSD (OWC 240 Gb), a mount for the optical bay, and a 1 Tb notebook drive, but they were supposed to go into different Macs. The articles about 'DIY Fusion Drives' showed up just a few days after they arrived. I thought that I would just give it a try, to see what was up. I followed the instructions in Steins JollyJinx blog, and the setup was pretty straightforward. My only question was about the 'logical drive' size. Was it supposed to be the size of the HD, or of the HD and SSD combined?? I chose the size of the HD.
It has been running for a couple of days, and so far, it has worked great, and I am impressed. I do admit, that the amount of data that I have in it, it probably is all on the SSD at this point. I have been mostly just trying it out and not putting any critical stuff on it, but this is a VERY tempting way to go...
In the "diskutil cs createVolume" step, you could have put "100%" rather than "1000g" or whatever size you specified. That would have given you the maximum size of the combined drives.
If you desire to preserve an existing Windows partition using the above procedure, can it be located on the SSD drive or does it have to be on the larger hard disk drive?
From reading others comments, creating a BootCamp partition for Windows on a "Fusion" drive will always locate it on the hard disk. For best boot/operational speed with Windows I would prefer to keep it on the SSD.
Thanks,
-howard
My Boot Camp partition was on the HDD to begin with (because I dropped the SSD in afterwards). It has a similar partition map to http://www.petralli.net/2012/10/what-happens-to-fusion-drive-when-you-use-boot-camp/
Having said that, if you fuse your drives using the specific partition on the SSD (eg disk1s1), I wonder whether you could keep a Boot Camp partition on the SSD?
Worse, I would fear that you could get some bad data corruption in this case, since the operating system doesn't expect that only half of a volume is there.
It probably won't work as a boot drive, because at some early stage while booting your computer, the external drive wouldn't be visible yet. And the whole point (from a user's point of view) is that with a Fusion drive, you don't have a separate boot drive and data drive but everything together.
Disabling this in the future without a very good reason would be a major legal problem. And there is no reason to disable this.
As far as the failure rate is concerned, you now have two drives which should increase the probability that one goes wrong. However, the spinning drive for example will most likely be filled with large files only, so there is a lot less movement for the read/write head (I would think that reading one 400 MB file puts much less wear on the hardware than reading 100,000 4 KB files), so your hard drive should last longer. And you keep these big files away from the SSD, so that lasts longer as well.
Not referring to the official Fusion drive, but the 'hack' reported here. I believe they are both the same though, but what if Apple can somehow disable the 'hack'? Would we lose all data, or would it simply become two drives with some files getting corrupted?
another success story
reformatted and reinstalled my 2011 mini and fused the internal 3rd party 1tb hard drive and internal 3rd party 180G SSD (yay ifixit dual-drive kit). reinstalled applications (i was housecleaning as well, getting rid of unused old applications) and restored documents. also enabled trim using trim enabler (was previously enabled when i had os x only on the SSD).
4 days later and the system is still running fine and is definitely a lot snappier than it was previously. i don't have any hard metrics, but i'm quite impressed with the performance. it almost seems like everything is on the SSD, though i know that's not true. at least, all the relevant parts are there to increase my performance. i'm happy with this tweak and sure hope apple doesn't nix support of it for older machines.
reformatted and reinstalled my 2011 mini and fused the internal 3rd party 1tb hard drive and internal 3rd party 180G SSD (yay ifixit dual-drive kit). reinstalled applications (i was housecleaning as well, getting rid of unused old applications) and restored documents. also enabled trim using trim enabler (was previously enabled when i had os x only on the SSD).
4 days later and the system is still running fine and is definitely a lot snappier than it was previously. i don't have any hard metrics, but i'm quite impressed with the performance. it almost seems like everything is on the SSD, though i know that's not true. at least, all the relevant parts are there to increase my performance. i'm happy with this tweak and sure hope apple doesn't nix support of it for older machines.
http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2012/20121103_3-Fusion-summary-so-far.html
he claims that the fusion(at least the DIY) drive doesn't "work"
he claims that the fusion(at least the DIY) drive doesn't "work"
OK, thanks!
Any have any data on what the effects are on performance/reliability/speed/etc. of setting the disk size to the smaller size, like I did? Better? Worse? Nothing except loose the missing space?
Maybe a solution would be if you find the
ID of your Logical Volume ,which you can find if you type in Terminal:
diskutil cs list
(the Logical Volume ID not the Logical Volume Family ID or the Logical Volume Group ID)
And then you type
diskutil cs resizeVolume 11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555 1225g
where11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555 is the ID of your Logical Volume
I configured two drives like this on Friday, working great so far.
It would be interesting if someone would test it on earlier OS versions and see how far back it goes.
I'm skeptical about what he said, going to run some tests on my machine.
It would be interesting if someone would test it on earlier OS versions and see how far back it goes.
I'm skeptical about what he said, going to run some tests on my machine.
The test for me is if you fill the fusion drive with 300GB stuff(or with 150 if your SSD is 128GB) and then run Blackmagic test
Since it's implemented in CoreStorage (the volume manager), it can't be any older than 10.7.
However, IMO it would be very risky to try to use it with anything less than 10.8.2 - it's possible that an early version of the fusion code is there but very buggy.
By the way, there's a nice description of CoreStorage at http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/04/mac-osx-lion-corestorage-volume-manager/ which hints at future features based on volume management. (There's also a link near top center to "undocumented CoreStorage features".)
The article made me do some sanity checks. It's not quite true that the hacked Fusion drive works like JBOD, or Just a Bunch Of Disks. Because a JBOD setup wouldn't keep free space in the SSD for writes. However, my hacked Fusion drive does.
Example: Copying iTunes albums in ~2 gig batches into the Fusion volume always first causes some SSD activity, then some HDD activity, and finally activity between SSD and HDD. Doing this over and over again repeats the pattern.
disk2/SSD disk6/HDD
KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s
Copy starting, writes to SSD:
113.98 115 12.78 0.00 0 0.00
118.02 411 47.42 0.00 0 0.00
123.67 363 43.80 0.00 0 0.00
126.44 491 60.58 0.00 0 0.00
Copy ongoing, switches to HDD:
111.28 410 44.59 124.68 152 18.48
22.04 51 1.10 124.82 469 57.12
24.52 54 1.29 124.10 525 63.67
4.00 1 0.00 78.01 249 18.96
Copy finished, activity between HDD and SSD, apparently freeing up space from SSD:
91.25 209 18.60 32.99 1118 36.03
45.14 461 20.34 128.00 142 17.73
66.48 316 20.48 128.00 154 19.22
24.50 160 3.82 128.00 23 2.87
0.00 0 0.00 87.88 32 2.74
0.00 0 0.00 0.00 0 0.00
Lines omitted for brevity; same pattern occurs when copying albums starting with A, then B, then C etc.
I have NOT been able to catch if or when it does caching from HDD to SSD, or verify if it does so at all. That part is not clear.
But this is:
- Recently written files are always available in SSD, unless the copy job was very big (several gigs), and some of the files got written to HDD.
- When doing a different multi-gig copy job, it will always first write to SSD, then to HDD, and at the end there's activity between both drives.
- VMWare virtual memory file (~1.5 gigs) is always available from SSD, which makes waking the VM up very fast, 200+ MB/s. The general feel of the drive is fast, SSD-like.
That's based on about 30 minutes of testing. I'm not a pro in this area and could have forgotten something.
Is there any other explanation for this behavior; could a JBOD setup keep space available on the first disk automatically?
It looks like he put his SSD in an external USB enclosure. SMART info is not available over USB (or FireWire). OS X needs to see the Solid State flag in SMART info for it to work, so the SSD must be connected to an internal SATA port.
edit:
from http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2012/20121102_3-DiskUtility-Fusion-MacMini.html [emphasis mine]:
MPGmini:~ admin$ diskutil info disk2
Device Identifier: disk2
Device Node: /dev/disk2
Part of Whole: disk2
Device / Media Name: OWC Elite Pro mini C Media
Volume Name: Not applicable (no file system)
Mounted: Not applicable (no file system)
File System: None
Content (IOContent): GUID_partition_scheme
OS Can Be Installed: No
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: USB
SMART Status: Not Supported
Total Size: 240.1 GB (240057409536 Bytes) (exactly 468862128 512-Byte-Blocks)
Volume Free Space: Not applicable (no file system)
Device Block Size: 512 Bytes
Read-Only Media: No
Read-Only Volume: Not applicable (no file system)
Ejectable: Yes
Whole: Yes
Internal: No
OS 9 Drivers: No
Low Level Format: Not supported
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