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Fusion Drive Question

RDowson

RDowson

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 22, 2010
300
108
Glasgow, Scotland
Hi,

I am about to build a fusion drive in a Late 2012 Mac Mini Server.

I plan to remove one of the two 1TB HDD's and replace is with an SSD so there.

I gather that it's quite straight forward and all I need to do is boot into internet recovery and disk utility will give me the option to 'Fix' the drives which will create the fusion drive automatically.

The question I have is that the internet connection is quite slow at the place where I will be doing the install. Can I just download Mountain Lion from the App Store on the Late 2012 Mac Mini and create a bootable USB using Lion Disk Maker? Will this give me the correct version of Disk Utility that's required to make the Fusion Drive?

Many thanks!
 
K

KrisLord

macrumors 68000
Sep 12, 2008
1,741
1,873
Northumberland, UK
I don't think the App Store version works with the 2012 macs as yet. They're all still running a slightly newer version (that has customised disc utility and other driver updates).
 
RDowson

RDowson

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 22, 2010
300
108
Glasgow, Scotland
KrisLord said:
I don't think the App Store version works with the 2012 macs as yet. They're all still running a slightly newer version (that has customised disc utility and other driver updates).
Click to expand...

Ok, thanks. I'll maybe leave the internet recovery going overnight then and it should be downloaded by the morning.

Do I just boot into disk utility (from internet recovery) and it should come up with an error (something about the disks?) and I just click fix and that will create a fusion drive, just like an Apple factory one?

Thanks
 
C

chrise2

macrumors 6502a
Sep 17, 2012
504
70
When I decided to undo my Fusion drives, I was able to maintain the existing recovery partition. Unless you currently have true full disk RAID 1 mirroring, your recovery partition exists on one of the drives. If you simply replace the other one with the SSD, then your recovery partition will remain intact and you'll be able to boot to it and create the fusion partition before installing OS X. You can use the disk utility before installing OS X and that's what will "fix" things to make the Fusion drive. You can also do it via command line.
 
donlab

donlab

macrumors 6502
Jun 3, 2004
305
94
USA
RamboRab said:
The question I have is that the internet connection is quite slow at the place where I will be doing the install. Can I just download Mountain Lion from the App Store on the Late 2012 Mac Mini and create a bootable USB using Lion Disk Maker? Will this give me the correct version of Disk Utility that's required to make the Fusion Drive?

Many thanks!
Click to expand...


App Store version is not the same as version available thru internets recovery.

Also, internet recovery will get you back to the same version your mac mini shipped with. I ordered a late 2012 mini from amazon and it shipped with 10.8.1. I tried internet recovery thinking apple would give me 10.8.2 and I got 10.8.1 again. You need 10.8.2 disk utility to create the fusion drive. The work around is to boot the stock mini, upgrade to 10.8.2, clone to external drive with Carbon copy cloner, boot from external drive, "fix your fusion drive" (it really is that easy) with disk utility, then install osx on new fusion drive.
 
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