Unfused my Fusion drive

[chrise2]

I got the new Mac mini with the Fusion drive option thinking I could live freely and let OS X manage where my stuff was. Turns out I was a bit too OCD for that. I found another thread that referenced this article:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/11...-fusion-drive/

Here's what I did:

- Booted into recovery mode
- At a terminal prompt did a "diskutil cs list" to show the info on the Fusion logical drive
- Ran a "diskutil cs deleteVolume <guid of Fusion volume>
- Ran a "diskutil cs delete <guid of Fusion volume group>
- That broke the Fusion and I was able to run the OS X installer and install the OS to the SSD. Note, that going into the gui diskutil results in a prompt to "fix" your drives. When I did that, it re-fused everything.
- After OS X was installed, I created sym links for folders I wanted on the 1 TB 5400 drive. I used the commands in this article:

http://gigaom.com/2011/04/27/how-to-...inks-on-a-mac/

Now I have full control over what goes where. Totally defeating the point of the Fusion drive. But now I don't have the "What the heck is the hard drive churning on when I'm not doing anything feeling?"

I'm still restoring all of my data, but so far, things appear to be working just fine. Just figured I'd share my experience if anyone else wanted to do the same.

[dukee101]

Just curious, did you undo Fusion because performance was lacking? Or simply because you couldn't track why the HDD was spinning when it was?

I'm about to buy a new Mac Mini and I've been told by various people to "trust the Fusion Drive algorithms" and that they're very speedy, even when they're 50-60% full with data.

But then again, I don't know. I haven't had enough real-world feedback on this issue. Maybe you can provide some.

[Exodist]

Some like the fusion drive setup. But like the OP I have OCD and a hard drive being to active to often drives me insane. I rather have performance and better control over my files myself.

[AC Rempt]

Weird. My hard drive is rarely active since I rolled my own Fusion drive. Are you guys working with larger files?

[TahoeBlue]

I very rarely have the hard drive spin up after the first week. And when it does, I barely hear it.

My Time Capsule, on the other hand, is super loud.

[chrise2]

I was hearing a lot of disk activity. When I work from home, I use an encrypted Windows VMware Fusion virtual machine. Its a single 50+ GB file. I'm wondering if Fusion was getting confused with that. Now that I have that forced on the SSD along with OS X and most of my settings, the only time I hear the HD spin up is when I access my photos, music or video (the content I put on the HD).

To be honest, the performance was totally fine . So, Fusion was probably mostly doing its job. I just really needed to know that the VM was on the SSD.

[Mr. Retrofire]

Originally Posted by chrise2

I was hearing a lot of disk activity. When I work from home, I use an encrypted Windows VMware Fusion virtual machine. Its a single 50+ GB file. I'm wondering if Fusion was getting confused with that. Now that I have that forced on the SSD along with OS X and most of my settings, the only time I hear the HD spin up is when I access my photos, music or video (the content I put on the HD).

Stop the drive indexing in the installed version of Windows (“C:” drive, probably via context menu -> Properties). See also:
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows...-xp-and-vista/

Or do you need this in your Windows VM? On the Mac side i disable spotlight on many drives/volumes, where i do not need spotlight (Time Machine volume, software/music/video archive, and so on).