Anybody get a RAID SSD work for a fusion drive?

[WizardHunt]

I bought a Lacie 1 TB SSD external drive. I am having problems because it is a raid setup. Apparently the Ssd drive uses two 512 GB ssd inside its enclosure.
I got the drives to fuse together, that is not the problem i am having. The problem I am having is when I try to restore from time machine I get a error stating that "An error occurred when adding a recovery system to the destination drive."

Any ideas for you experts out there?

 

[kapalua12]

I bought a Lacie 1 TB SSD external drive. I am having problems because it is a raid setup. Apparently the Ssd drive uses two 512 GB ssd inside its enclosure.
I got the drives to fuse together, that is not the problem i am having. The problem I am having is when I try to restore from time machine I get a error stating that "An error occurred when adding a recovery system to the destination drive."

Any ideas for you experts out there?

Are you using the LaCie 1TB SSD Little Big Disk as the drive to which Time Machine is pointed to backup to? Or are you using Time Machine to restore your LaCie SSD Little Big Disk? If the former, that seems like a very expensive and unnecessary use of such a fast drive.

 

[WizardHunt]

Are you using the LaCie 1TB SSD Little Big Disk as the drive to which Time Machine is pointed to backup to? Or are you using Time Machine to restore your LaCie SSD Little Big Disk? If the former, that seems like a very expensive and unnecessary use of such a fast drive.

no you are confused. I added a LaCie 1 TB SSD drive to my setup which is a 3 TB iMac 3.4 to make a Fusion Drive anyway, I was trying to restore my system that i had backed up on my time machine, but it was given me a error. Now I know that you can not use Raid it seems. I would NEVER USE A SSD for a TIME MACHINE Drive.

What I ended up doing to pass-by this problem is to break apart the Raid and treat them like separate drives even though they are still in the single enclosure. Now it is working great. Got the restore done from my Time Machine backup. It is much faster than before. But there is a minor drawback by breaking apart the Raid setup. I lost a little bit of speed. I should have got around 630-700 MB/s for reading speeds, but instead I am seeing 500+ MB/s and that is nothing to sneeze at. I just set it up so that my 3.0 TB is joined with just one of the SSD drives making it a 3.5 TB Fusion. Then I am using the other part of the drive as a rendering drive for now.

 

[AppleNewton]

The error occurred since OS X cant put a recovery partition on a RAID Volume and on top of a Fusion set-up (which is sort of RAID-like) which removes the recovery partition after fusing drives together, might have just 'erked' out the install process as I think its meant to combine two drives and not multiple drives in a combined fashion.
So currently 1x512 +3TB might be the best set-up you can accomplish with it and use the other 512 as a scratch or render drive

 

[WizardHunt]

The error occurred since OS X cant put a recovery partition on a RAID Volume and on top of a Fusion set-up (which is sort of RAID-like) which removes the recovery partition after fusing drives together, might have just 'erked' out the install process as I think its meant to combine two drives and not multiple drives in a combined fashion.
So currently 1x512 +3TB might be the best set-up you can accomplish with it and use the other 512 as a scratch or render drive

Exactly, that is what happened to me and I think I have it set up the best I can do for now which is what you quoted me doing. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[AppleNewton]

no problem, just ensuring you werent doing anything wrong.

btw how are the drives performing and do you know which 512 SSDs are in your LaCie?

 

[WizardHunt]

no problem, just ensuring you werent doing anything wrong.

btw how are the drives performing and do you know which 512 SSDs are in your LaCie?

i actually do not know which brand is inside the Lacie enclosure. I did not remove them. I only configured them separately. My guess is samsung. Reading speeds are 500+ MB/s and Writing is about 255 MB/s if I kept it as raid 0 it could have been up to 650-700 MB/s for reading.

However while I have you here, later on if I wanted to do a complete fresh reinstall and not use the time machine for restoring only for backing up later on. Could I put the Raid set up back together and use it with the iMac while still making a Fusion Drive?

 

[hfg]

You can look in System Information under your Serial-ATA devices and probably identify the SSD brand used in the LaCie LBD.

I did, just for fun yesterday, build a Fusion drive with a RAID-0 SSD pair joined with a 3TB hard disk drive. When I tried to clean install OS X it complained about not being able to create a recovery partition (normal for RAID-0 drives), and would not allow me to continue (NOT normal for RAID-0 drives, you get a warning but are allowed to continue without it). Since the Fusion drive itself looked OK, I just used CCC to clone my OS X system to the Fusion drive from the original disks I had been using. It all seemed to be working as expected in my Mac Pro, but I have not used it for an extended time to see if any issues might develop with other software. It was nice to have the speed of RAID-0 SSD along with the large capacity of the hard disk in the Fusion array.

The LaCie Little Big Disk uses the Apple RAID configuration in Disk Utility, so you can re-RAID it at any time in RAID-0, RAID-1, or concatenate the 2 drives into one. I have also wanted to put a SSD and a hard disk in the LBD enclosure, then create a stand-alone Thunderbolt Fusion drive.


-howard

 

[kapalua12]

You can look in System Information under your Serial-ATA devices and probably identify the SSD brand used in the LaCie LBD.

I did, just for fun yesterday, build a Fusion drive with a RAID-0 SSD pair joined with a 3TB hard disk drive. When I tried to clean install OS X it complained about not being able to create a recovery partition (normal for RAID-0 drives), and would not allow me to continue (NOT normal for RAID-0 drives, you get a warning but are allowed to continue without it). Since the Fusion drive itself looked OK, I just used CCC to clone my OS X system to the Fusion drive from the original disks I had been using. It all seemed to be working as expected in my Mac Pro, but I have not used it for an extended time to see if any issues might develop with other software. It was nice to have the speed of RAID-0 SSD along with the large capacity of the hard disk in the Fusion array.

The LaCie Little Big Disk uses the Apple RAID configuration in Disk Utility, so you can re-RAID it at any time in RAID-0, RAID-1, or concatenate the 2 drives into one. I have also wanted to put a SSD and a hard disk in the LBD enclosure, then create a stand-alone Thunderbolt Fusion drive.


-howard

The LaCie Little Big Disk uses OEM Micron 400 SSD's

 

[jpmorais]

no you are confused. I added a LaCie 1 TB SSD drive to my setup which is a 3 TB iMac 3.4 to make a Fusion Drive anyway, I was trying to restore my system that i had backed up on my time machine, but it was given me a error. Now I know that you can not use Raid it seems. I would NEVER USE A SSD for a TIME MACHINE Drive.

What I ended up doing to pass-by this problem is to break apart the Raid and treat them like separate drives even though they are still in the single enclosure. Now it is working great. Got the restore done from my Time Machine backup. It is much faster than before. But there is a minor drawback by breaking apart the Raid setup. I lost a little bit of speed. I should have got around 630-700 MB/s for reading speeds, but instead I am seeing 500+ MB/s and that is nothing to sneeze at. I just set it up so that my 3.0 TB is joined with just one of the SSD drives making it a 3.5 TB Fusion. Then I am using the other part of the drive as a rendering drive for now.

Just restore to your imac 3TB fusion, then use super duper to clone to lacie raid 0.

 

[WizardHunt]

no problem, just ensuring you werent doing anything wrong.

btw how are the drives performing and do you know which 512 SSDs are in your LaCie?

I looked up the drives in the about this Mac and found that the 2 SSD drives that are inside the LaCie SSD 1 TB model is two of these - - - > 512GB Micron RealSSD C400 MTFDDAK512MAM-1K12 Self-Encrypting 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s SSD.

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Just restore to your imac 3TB fusion, then use super duper to clone to lacie raid 0.

i guess i am not following you exactly. You mentioned to just restore to your iMac 3TB Fusion. But if it will not restore from Time Machine How can this be done step by step?

Actually my 2nd question was if I return the 1 TB SSD LaCie Drive back to original Raid 0 Setup, then by-pass the Time Machine and do a fresh install after making the Fusion Drive then is it possible without it stopping me to install everything from scratch, ie.... applications , OS/X, so on. I think i have to do without Finding my Mac and not being able to use File Vault which I don't use anyway so it would not deeply affect me. If so please list it out so I can understand it better. I am fairly good with rebuilt and configuring but never touched a raid setup so it is new to me. Any ideas?

 

[AppleNewton]

try rebuilding the RAID0 for the SSDs, erase the HDD, if you have a 3rd HDD or if your mac is capable of booting into OS X Recovery do that and then use the Terminal in there to Fuse the SSDs and HDD.

Use the Disk Identifier for the Thunderbolt drive, not sure if it shows individual IDs for each SSD in the raid enclosure or not, but just use the one that is identified as the RAID0 array and it should Fuse properly with corestorage.

 

[WizardHunt]

try rebuilding the RAID0 for the SSDs, erase the HDD, if you have a 3rd HDD or if your mac is capable of booting into OS X Recovery do that and then use the Terminal in there to Fuse the SSDs and HDD.

Use the Disk Identifier for the Thunderbolt drive, not sure if it shows individual IDs for each SSD in the raid enclosure or not, but just use the one that is identified as the RAID0 array and it should Fuse properly with corestorage.

Now another question. Since I broke apart the raid 0 configuration. How do I put it back to raid 0 where the two drives show as 1 TB instead of 2 512 GB ?

Is there some certain way of doing this?

 

[hfg]

try rebuilding the RAID0 for the SSDs, erase the HDD, if you have a 3rd HDD or if your mac is capable of booting into OS X Recovery do that and then use the Terminal in there to Fuse the SSDs and HDD.

Use the Disk Identifier for the Thunderbolt drive, not sure if it shows individual IDs for each SSD in the raid enclosure or not, but just use the one that is identified as the RAID0 array and it should Fuse properly with corestorage.

He will see the individual disk IDs for each SSD in the enclosure. However, he will also find the RAID-0 ID in the list, and that is the one that should be used when creating the Fusion drive, along with the hard disk ID.

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Now another question. Since I broke apart the raid 0 configuration. How do I put it back to raid 0 where the two drives show as 1 TB instead of 2 512 GB ?

Is there some certain way of doing this?

Use Disk Utility under the RAID tab and simply drag the 2 disks into the array. Be sure to select "striped" to get RAID-0 configuration. You should see the total size listed as 1TB.

 

[WizardHunt]

He will see the individual disk IDs for each SSD in the enclosure. However, he will also find the RAID-0 ID in the list, and that is the one that should be used when creating the Fusion drive, along with the hard disk ID.

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Use Disk Utility under the RAID tab and simply drag the 2 disks into the array. Be sure to select "striped" to get RAID-0 configuration. You should see the total size listed as 1TB.

Thanks for the information. I will be doing that when I have some free time which will be soon. I want to put the raid back and remake the Fusion Drive and I understand that I have to do it as a fresh install, otherwise I will get that Unable to find the Recovery Disk Error.

 

[LaCieTech]

Thanks for the information. I will be doing that when I have some free time which will be soon. I want to put the raid back and remake the Fusion Drive and I understand that I have to do it as a fresh install, otherwise I will get that Unable to find the Recovery Disk Error.

Hi,

There have been several topics and questions along this thread. I think instead of writing a novel here I should just give your our phone number. Our techs are at 503-844-4500 (USA) or www.lacie.com/mystuff.

Get in contact with us and we will make sure your drive is all setup and all your questions regarding functionality are answered. It might a lot faster to get you all squared away with a phone call.

~mn, LaCie

 

[WizardHunt]

Hi,

There have been several topics and questions along this thread. I think instead of writing a novel here I should just give your our phone number. Our techs are at 503-844-4500 (USA) or www.lacie.com/mystuff.

Get in contact with us and we will make sure your drive is all setup and all your questions regarding functionality are answered. It might a lot faster to get you all squared away with a phone call.

~mn, LaCie

Great I will do just that. Expect a call on Friday.

 

[WizardHunt]

Finally got it to work with Raid 0 setup

Ok Finally done. I managed to re-configure the raid 0 setup and now i have a 4 TB Fusion Drive that screams Speed. It was done by using Carbon Copy Clone which i cloned to my other SSD Drive i have. Booted up to the Clone. Went into Terminal , Made my Fusion drive using the 3.0 TB HHD + LaCie Little Big Drive 1 TB SSD +4.01 Fusion Drive that is now a speed demon. Cloned it back to the Fusion Drive and Done. Test results below.

As you can see in the picture after clicking on it. I am getting write speeds of 460.8 sometimes higher. . . and for reading it is 668.0 and sometimes even higher. So now I am a very happy camper. Not bad for a Fusion Drive setup that is setup using a external SSD drive.

I wish to thank the following members of this Board for pointing me in the right direction: AppleNewton, hfg, and the techs at LaCie.

 

[hfg]

That looks great! Glad you got it working again.

Could you elaborate on what the LaCie Technical Support instructed you to do to get maximum performance out of your system?

Thanks,
-howard

 

[WizardHunt]

That looks great! Glad you got it working again.

Could you elaborate on what the LaCie Technical Support instructed you to do to get maximum performance out of your system?

Thanks,
-howard

Sure, would be glad to. Basically they reset the raid 0 back to original setup like it came out of the box, as you can remember i broke them apart. This was easier than I thought to setup as I have no raid experience until now. Once I got it back to raid setup, then They mentioned to me only 1 point that was relevant and that was when I made the Fusion Drive to make sure then creating it that I place the LaCie SSD 1 TB Drive in front or first when combining the Drives to make the fusion.

I had a bit of trouble at first with the remaking of the Fusion but once I figured out the exact Disks to use in my case it was /Dev/Disk4 /Dev/Disk2s2 then i was ok. I was getting confused on using /Dev/Disk4 /Dev/Disk2 gave me an error. Disk4 was the raid formed drive that showed 1 TB in my Diskutil listing... Disk2s2 was my stock 3.0 TB HD from Apple. Anyway it all went together just fine using Disk2s2.

Then I cloned the drive back to the New Fusion Drive. Something that I did before I cloned my drive on my own is I did defrag my drive and made it the fastest i could with what I had to work with. Hope this helps you some about what I did. If not ask and I will see if I can answer it.

One thing to mention, My iMac i am using has 3.4 GHz, 32 GB ram, 2 GB Video , and now a Fusion 4.01 drive.

 

[AppleNewton]

Congrats, looks like a killer setup. hope to works wonders for ya!

Actually seems like a doable setup, may have to consider something like this.

 

[WizardHunt]

Congrats, looks like a killer setup. hope to works wonders for ya!

Actually seems like a doable setup, may have to consider something like this.

Thanks.

 

[hfg]

Congrats, looks like a killer setup. hope to works wonders for ya!

Actually seems like a doable setup, may have to consider something like this.

Give it a try ... You will probably like it!

As mentioned in post #8, I did build a RAID-0 / Fusion array a few days ago, and so far I haven't seen any downside to it ... and it is really fast! I built mine from a pair of 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs and a 3TB hard disk in my Mac Pro (well, actually it is a 256GB and 1/2 of a 512GB SSD ... the other 1/2 is a bootable Windows OS). I am having a bit of a Windows issue, as I have discovered the PCIe SATA-III dual drive card I am using doesn't seem to want to boot Windows (being on a PCIe card, it is considered an "external drive" which Windows has a problem with).

But, the OS X part of the RAID-0/Fusion seems to be working great!


-howard