Mac mini Dilemma!

[Mike in Kansas]

Originally Posted by motrek

You can buy a 3rd party SSD and a cheap USB 3 enclosure, plug it into the Mini, and have almost the same performance for as little as $100, plus you can use whatever size/brand SSD you want.

I would recommend going this route--buy a relatively small external SSD for your OS and programs, use the standard internal hard drive for samples and tracks.

Then try moving some samples/tracks to the SSD and see if it gives you a big speed improvement. If so, maybe you will want to move all your samples/tracks to an SSD, so you can easily buy a big and expensive SSD and switch to that.

You can also "fuse" the external SSD with the internal HDD to create a home-grown FusionDrive as well. An option to consider if you don't want to manually move stuff around....

[motrek]

Originally Posted by Mike in Kansas

You can also "fuse" the external SSD with the internal HDD to create a home-grown FusionDrive as well. An option to consider if you don't want to manually move stuff around....

I didn't think it was possible to create a Fusion drive using an external disk?

[Mike in Kansas]

Originally Posted by motrek

I didn't think it was possible to create a Fusion drive using an external disk?

I "fused" together a 240GB internal SSD with a 2TB FW800 external HDD to make a 2.2TB Fusion Drive for my 2008 iMac. The folks at Macworld did a tutorial on creating your own FusionDrive and claim to have created a FusionDrive with 2 flash drives:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2014...ion-drive.html

[Luis2004]

Originally Posted by Mike in Kansas

I "fused" together a 240GB internal SSD with a 2TB FW800 external HDD to make a 2.2TB Fusion Drive for my 2008 iMac. The folks at Macworld did a tutorial on creating your own FusionDrive and claim to have created a FusionDrive with 2 flash drives:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2014...ion-drive.html

This looks awesome! I'm going to give it a try in a few minutes!

Just one question. If I do a Time Machine back up before I try this, will it really restore all of my files, media, and apps when I'm done fusing the two drives?

I've had my mini (first mac ever) for about a month and haven't had to restore anything from TM yet, so I'm curious.







P.S:

Also, I will be including a 3TB external (1 TB is partitioned for Time Machine). If I fuse the drives, does that mean that I will have to carry the external with me wherever I go, if I choose to take the Mini with me somewhere?

[motrek]

Originally Posted by Luis2004

This looks awesome! I'm going to give it a try in a few minutes!

Just one question. If I do a Time Machine back up before I try this, will it really restore all of my files, media, and apps when I'm done fusing the two drives?

I've had my mini (first mac ever) for about a month and haven't had to restore anything from TM yet, so I'm curious.

P.S:

Also, I will be including a 3TB external (1 TB is partitioned for Time Machine). If I fuse the drives, does that mean that I will have to carry the external with me wherever I go, if I choose to take the Mini with me somewhere?

I assume Time Machine will work (otherwise, what's the point?) but just to be safe I would use SuperDuper! or a similar tool to make sure I had an exact copy of my disk(s) before trying something like this.

Also, yes, you will need to have all of the drives of your Fusion setup mounted for it to work at all. There's no telling which data is on which drive. Trying to use a Fusion drive without one of its component disks would be like randomly erasing half your data.

[Mike in Kansas]

Originally Posted by Luis2004

This looks awesome! I'm going to give it a try in a few minutes!

Just one question. If I do a Time Machine back up before I try this, will it really restore all of my files, media, and apps when I'm done fusing the two drives?

I've had my mini (first mac ever) for about a month and haven't had to restore anything from TM yet, so I'm curious.







P.S:

Also, I will be including a 3TB external (1 TB is partitioned for Time Machine). If I fuse the drives, does that mean that I will have to carry the external with me wherever I go, if I choose to take the Mini with me somewhere?

Whoa! Hold on their big fella! Don't just go doing this until you've thought it through!

Whatever disks you use will be COMPLETELY erased, so if your TM backup resides on one of the same disks that you want to fuse, you will lose it.

I am very cautious when it comes to messing with my hard drives. Before doing this, I had both a TM backup of my boot disk, a TM backup of my external data disk, and clones of both as well. After I fused my internal SSD with my external FW800 drive, I cloned my boot drive back to the newly-made Fusion Drive, then cloned my data drive to the Fusion Drive as well. I kept all of my TM backups and clones around for a week before cloning my new Fusion Drive and doing a TM backup of my FusionDrive.

If you try and boot your Mini without the external drive attached, it will just sit there waiting to boot, as half of it is missing. That is a risk you need to be aware of. So yes, you need to have the external drive attached or it won't boot off of the internal drive.

[Luis2004]

Originally Posted by Mike in Kansas

Whoa! Hold on their big fella! Don't just go doing this until you've thought it through!

Whatever disks you use will be COMPLETELY erased, so if your TM backup resides on one of the same disks that you want to fuse, you will lose it.

I am very cautious when it comes to messing with my hard drives. Before doing this, I had both a TM backup of my boot disk, a TM backup of my external data disk, and clones of both as well. After I fused my internal SSD with my external FW800 drive, I cloned my boot drive back to the newly-made Fusion Drive, then cloned my data drive to the Fusion Drive as well. I kept all of my TM backups and clones around for a week before cloning my new Fusion Drive and doing a TM backup of my FusionDrive.

If you try and boot your Mini without the external drive attached, it will just sit there waiting to boot, as half of it is missing. That is a risk you need to be aware of. So yes, you need to have the external drive attached or it won't boot off of the internal drive.

So even if I have my external partitioned, it will still wipe the partitions? My 3 TB external, for example, is partitioned and Finder views it as 2 separate drives: TM and External HD. Couldn't I just choose to include the External HD in the fusion, and leave TM as is?

[Mike in Kansas]

Originally Posted by Luis2004

So even if I have my external partitioned, it will still wipe the partitions? My 3 TB external, for example, is partitioned and Finder views it as 2 separate drives: TM and External HD. Couldn't I just choose to include the External HD in the fusion, and leave TM as is?

That's a good question. I don't know the answer off the top of my head without looking into it a bit. The Macworld tutorial says it erases the disks COMPLETELY. I want to say that FD works at the disk level, and not the partition level. I know that my ML restore partition got wiped out when I did this, so I think it takes the whole disk. You can partition it AFTER you create a FD, but not before.

[Luis2004]

Originally Posted by Mike in Kansas

That's a good question. I don't know the answer off the top of my head without looking into it a bit. The Macworld tutorial says it erases the disks COMPLETELY. I want to say that FD works at the disk level, and not the partition level. I know that my ML restore partition got wiped out when I did this, so I think it takes the whole disk. You can partition it AFTER you create a FD, but not before.

Yeah, I think I'm going to go a different route. The 1TB hard drive that was originally in the Mini is sitting in a plastic bag in a drawer (I had swapped it out with a 180GB SSD drive). I think I'll put that baby in a 3.0 USB enclosure, and that way I won't have to lug around a huge drive with its own power cord.

I'll just keep using the 3TB for media, etc.

Thanks for the tip, though. I would have hated to have jumped right in and lost all my stuff.