DIY Fusion Drive

"Also has anyone found a source for the right version of disk utility?"

I believe you already have the tools you need.

Try this (no guarantees, but it should work):
1. Back up the contents of the current drive in the Mini to an external source using CarbonCopyCloner so that it's BOOTABLE. DO NOT USE Time Machine! And TEST your clone before proceeding, to be sure that it will boot the Mini.
2. Install the second drive (that's the SSD drive, correct?)
3. With both drives installed, boot to the recovery partition
4. Once booted from the recovery partition, open Disk Utility
5. At this point, DU should survey the situation, and discover that there are both a HDD and an SSD present, but not "fused".
6. In that case, DU will offer to "repair" the drives -- and in the process of so doing, will -automatically- "fuse them together".
7. When done, you will now have a "fusion drive" (with nothing on it).
8. Reboot from the cloned backup drive
9. RE-CLONE the contents of the backup back to the fusion drive.

When completed, you should have a fusion drive with the contents that were originally on the non-fused HDD drive...

I had no luck cloning to my home-made Fusion drive, instead I installed fresh on it and then migrated from the clone using Migration Assistant.

Same here. Easiest way to do it (done it twice now), was :

- due the physical work to get the drive in place.
- Boot up holding Command-R to get into Recovery Mode
- Use Terminal to do the Fusion Work
- Restore from Time Machine backup (or, reinstall OS X Fresh and Migrate).

Very easy.

I cloned mine with no issue; I simply clone my single drive to a single USB drive, installed my SSD, made the Fusion drive, booted from USB, then cloned with CCC. However, do we know for sure that a homemade Fusion works? I've been meaning to test-fill mine and see what happens. I've heard that once the SSD fills, that on pre-2012 hardware it will simply take to using the HDD; it doesn't keep the free buffer. Don't know if that's true of all homemade Fusions or just on pre-2012s.

Fishrrman said:

"Also has anyone found a source for the right version of disk utility?"

I believe you already have the tools you need.

Try this (no guarantees, but it should work):
1. Back up the contents of the current drive in the Mini to an external source using CarbonCopyCloner so that it's BOOTABLE. DO NOT USE Time Machine! And TEST your clone before proceeding, to be sure that it will boot the Mini.
2. Install the second drive (that's the SSD drive, correct?)
3. With both drives installed, boot to the recovery partition
4. Once booted from the recovery partition, open Disk Utility
5. At this point, DU should survey the situation, and discover that there are both a HDD and an SSD present, but not "fused".
6. In that case, DU will offer to "repair" the drives -- and in the process of so doing, will -automatically- "fuse them together".
7. When done, you will now have a "fusion drive" (with nothing on it).
8. Reboot from the cloned backup drive
9. RE-CLONE the contents of the backup back to the fusion drive.

When completed, you should have a fusion drive with the contents that were originally on the non-fused HDD drive...

Click to expand...

is that Recovery 10.8.2 ??... I´ve got a new Mini Server 2.6/16/2*1TB and I´ll switch one of disks to a Ocz Vector 512GB SSD, and do a fresh install from usb thumb. Disk Utility should automatically create a Fusiondrive for me right??

Got an error, found work around

Squeak825 said:

Same here. Easiest way to do it (done it twice now), was :

- due the physical work to get the drive in place.
- Boot up holding Command-R to get into Recovery Mode
- Use Terminal to do the Fusion Work
- Restore from Time Machine backup (or, reinstall OS X Fresh and Migrate).

Very easy.

Click to expand...

I tried to restore from Time Machine but it said there was an error in setting up the Recovery drive (on the Fusion HD) so I just a fresh OS X and then restored from Time Machine