Apple's New Fusion Drive Works on Older Macs

[Tech198]

*chuckles to self*

(Bet Apple's really cheesed of by this one)...

Thinking they came up with something *new* and only for the iMac, when in fact you can do in on older Macs too..... Its not rocket science where dealing with here......

Apple needs to learn. If theres a way, people will find it

 

[BC2009]

OWC charges 60 bucks for the adapter, you can get one on ebay for 15.

They do charge $60 individually, but as a bundle you can get the adapter, the 120GB SSD, and the toolkit for $155.

The drive by itself is $120 ($1 per GB), so getting on eBay would still save a few bucks.

Is it the same adapter?

 

[Cougarcat]

You can try following my guide I wrote up for this: here

Do you have to wipe the drives, combine them with the diskutil command, and then reinstall? Or can you get away with using the command on an existing install? I imagine not, right?

Apple needs to learn. If theres a way, people will find it

I doubt Apple cares about a few nerds typing terminal commands into their Mac to achieve this. Normal People won't be doing this.

 

[Prodo123]

That's what I was going to say. Misleading article title is misleading. It's the software that works on other Macs, not the drive itself.

You appear to have not understood what Fusion Drive truly is.
Fusion Drive is a software implementation of data management between two disks listed under a single volume. It may as well use a standard hard drive and a standard SSD; it is completely unrelated to hardware. It's purely a software job, and it appears that Stein has emulated it effectively.

Of course we won't know if his solution is exactly like Apple's, since not many people actually have the newer Macs, but it sure as heck looks like it worked.

 

[SPUY767]

What Apple needs to allow is a Fusion setup using a discrete SSD and HDD. The single unit "Fusion Drive" is good for single drive devices, but would be a waste of a drive bay in something like a Mac Pro.

Edit: Apparently I should read all the comments first.

 

[Berserker-UK]

Nit-pick: It doesn't sacrifice reliability. It sacrifices robustness.

Since it appears from reports that the software 'Fusion Drive' works at the block level, you could easily get into a situation where half a file is on one disk and the other half is on the other. One disk goes away and what's left on the other disk is as good as useless. The disk still works, but your data is still gone.

There also has to be 'glue' (metadata) somewhere that tells the system which disk your data is on. So assuming that's on the SSD (doesn't make sense for it to be on the HDD), if the SSD dies, the 'glue' is gone and your data falls apart.

So yes, you can call it robustness, but that still means the chance of failure is the sum of the parts - which is obviously more than each part alone. Ergo, time machine!

 

[ncaissie]

Since it appears from reports that the software 'Fusion Drive' works at the block level, you could easily get into a situation where half a file is on one disk and the other half is on the other. One disk goes away and what's left on the other disk is as good as useless. The disk still works, but your data is still gone.

There also has to be 'glue' (metadata) somewhere that tells the system which disk your data is on. So assuming that's on the SSD (doesn't make sense for it to be on the HDD), if the SSD dies, the 'glue' is gone and your data falls apart.

So yes, you can call it robustness, but that still means the chance of failure is the sum of the parts - which is obviously more than each part alone. Ergo, time machine!

But if the Apple drive is simply two drives in one and when one goes you pay more to fix it and all your files are gone.
Using two drives on your own is cheaper and less costly to replace. As you said Time machine is the answer for recovering your files.

 

[djdawson]

Recovery Partition?

The Apple docs say you can add one partition to a Fusion Drive, but it's not clear if that's in addition to the hidden Recovery Partition that typically gets created during the original install of Mt. Lion. The Apple Fusion Drive FAQ mentions using the Internet Recovery option to repair a corrupt Fusion Drive (wipe it, really), which suggests to me that the Recovery Partition may no longer be there on Fusion Drives. Sounds like it still might be worth it to create a bootable install drive in case of disaster, just for those cases when the Internet isn't quite convenient enough...

 

[Tech198]

Well... i can see a problem already.... only 1 additional partition ?

(bet Spinrite won't touch it)

 

[Rocketman]

Some testing would be in order before trying that; the impression I got is that after it's had time to analyse your usage patterns, Fusion Drive will keep data on the fastest drive. If that's RAM, then you'll lose that data on reboot!

A Mac is UNIX. You never need to reboot. Time Machine updates everything all the time. Ramdrives are way underutilized. Besides you could tell it it is a Ramdrive so it backs it up to a portion of disc as well. The relative costs will limit the hardship to achieve that.

 

[risotto]

Do you have to wipe the drives, combine them with the diskutil command, and then reinstall? Or can you get away with using the command on an existing install? I imagine not, right?

Like I mentioned in my blog post, if you plan to enable this for your main drives, yes, you'll have to wipe all existing partitions. You cannot create the LVM gracefully.

 

[milo]

But if the Apple drive is simply two drives in one and when one goes you pay more to fix it and all your files are gone.
Using two drives on your own is cheaper and less costly to replace. As you said Time machine is the answer for recovering your files.

I don't see how it's more costly. If one drive fails, you replace one drive. And whether you have one drive or two, you're still restoring from a backup.

 

[ikir]

nice!

I'm thinking about a Fusion drive with SSD and a SDXC (45Mb/s) in an Air/retina Pro. With Nifty drive you can put an SD in a Pro/Air completely integrated inside!


http://theniftyminidrive.com/products/macbook-retina

 

[tbrinkma]

Since it appears from reports that the software 'Fusion Drive' works at the block level, you could easily get into a situation where half a file is on one disk and the other half is on the other. One disk goes away and what's left on the other disk is as good as useless. The disk still works, but your data is still gone.

There also has to be 'glue' (metadata) somewhere that tells the system which disk your data is on. So assuming that's on the SSD (doesn't make sense for it to be on the HDD), if the SSD dies, the 'glue' is gone and your data falls apart.

So yes, you can call it robustness, but that still means the chance of failure is the sum of the parts - which is obviously more than each part alone. Ergo, time machine!

Reliability is how often something fails. Robustness is how well something fails. They're similar, but distinct concepts.

For example, a single HDD is actually slightly more reliable than a RAID array made with identical drives, because a single drive is less likely to fail than one of a bunch. The RAID array, on the other hand is more robust because it can recover from that failure.

 

[petterihiisila]

Will it work over SCSI?

I have an SSD and HDD connected via HighPoint SCSI card. System Info says S.M.A.R.T. info is not available. I wonder if this trick will work over such setup? I guess there's only one way to find out... will report findings later.

 

[John.B]

I like the idea of the FusionDrive - had it myself some years ago as a matter of fact, but who cares.

What I am interested in:
What happens if the SSD in this setup fails? (after complete re-writing to the HDD of cause) Maybe the author or anyone else could test this.
Would be a great option to beef up my 27" without the hassle of splitting my data and still have the benefits of the SSD while working.

This is what I was thinking. If I were to use Superduper to clone just the SSD or just the HDD, when the contents changed and I did a restore I'm likely to not have backed up what I need, since the data location can be so dynamic.

So it has to be a clone of the single virtualized view of both drives. Then if I cloned that backup to another Fusion Drive, it would be up to OSX to have to figure out (from scratch) what to move on to the SSD and what to leave on HDD.

This is a subtle but different mindset than the old way of managing fast and slow storage separately, where (for instance) all "OS and applications" went to the SSD and all "user data" went to a slower HDD.

It'll be nice when the capacities and prices of SSDs get the point where most people will only run SSDs, but this seems like a good interim step.

 

[kemal]

Trim?

A third-party SSD may not be recognized for TRIM support in OS X. It can be re-enabled with a perl hack.

----------

A Mac is UNIX. You never need to reboot. Time Machine updates everything all the time. Ramdrives are way underutilized. Besides you could tell it it is a Ramdrive so it backs it up to a portion of disc as well. The relative costs will limit the hardship to achieve that.

Stop that. OS X is not unix. It is a context switching Mach micro-kernel nightmare.

 

[brainzilla]

You get to use Time Machine to restore your data from backup.

Is that a FACT or just an ASSUMPTION?
Of cause I have a backup at all time, still the SSD is only the "cache" in this setup. So I wonder.

If you store your system and applications on your SSD, and your iTunes library, your Photo libraries, your Video and Media files on your Hard Drive, there is no need for this "Fusion" system. I like the way my system works as it is, I don't want the system "moving" files between the two drives and slowing things down. My system is fast as lightning!

Looking at my workstation the situation is different:
- Adobe alone needs 40 GB if you install all the apps.
- System needs around 10 GB, but who's counting?
- Customer-data is way over 200 GB and since Adobe apps are slow as a mule already, caching just the 2 GB I will use that day is a very nifty idea in my eyes!

 

[AidenShaw]

It has not yet been determined how the software "discovers" the SSD (or crippleware drive if reversed), but one suspects it is using SMART.

Windows does a quick uncached random read test at boot time - the latencies for spinning HDDs are orders of magnitude greater than the latencies for solid state HDDs.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...e/thread/c4cca52e-81c3-4139-b600-502b0fbd32fc

As it says in that post "few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs".

A "Fusion Drive" is two physical drives presented as one logical drive. So it is both two devices and one device at the same time.

Systems with proper volume managers have been doing this since well before the turn of the century.

Windows can very easily create a "concatenated" volume with an HDD partition plus an SSD partition. (The 1.128 TB volume)

One could also create a "filter driver" that would track usage and migrate files or sectors. In fact, the "defrag" APIs specifically support moving files that are open and being written. Such a filter driver would merely need to call the standard "defrag move" API to move a file between partitions - even if it's open and being written to.

I don't know of any such filter drivers that exist.

This "uncertainty principle" about what is really underneath an opaque block of storage is old news.

 

[deconstruct60]

*chuckles to self*
Thinking they came up with something *new* and only for the iMac,

Apple must be chuckling even harder . Current Mac Mini markteing page.

" ... Introducing Fusion Drive. ... "

http://www.apple.com/mac-mini/features.html#memory


Fact is you need two internal SATA storage drives for a supported configuration. Right now the only two new Macs with two SATA storage drive supported configurations are the mini and the iMac.

Apple is being very conservative in what parts of the new (relative to the pre-Lion era) CoreStorage features they are rolling out as being ready for prime time. Lion just got File Vault 2. Mountain Lion just got Fusion months after ML shipped.

Folks should use the context to inform whether taking CoreStorage for a test drive into places Apple may not be testing it on meets their risk tolerance or not.

 

[WardC]

Fusion drives? Forget it, I want my multi-SSD RAID drive!!!

Blade SSD storage is small enough that you could fix sixteen 512GB flash blade units onto one "drive" and RAID them all together...then Apple could really have something to offer...

That would be an 8TB SSD RAID running at 16x the speed of one blade-SSD alone. Insanity....nothing would be able to operate fast enough to match the read or write apeed of such a drive, unless you were running another SSD-RAID of some sorts on Thunderbolt or through eSATA or something fast.....

The only downside is that with the price of flash today, we are talking about a $7,000 - $8,000 drive.

 

[Macboy Pro]

Now another reason I'm glad I didn't get the substantially worse new iMac and opted for the 2011 gen last Wednesday

The process will most likely get simplier, perhaps even an app made what automates the process of making the fusion drive. Then i'd just get a Thunderbolt SSD and stick with my 500GB Internally. I know it says only SATA for now, but you never know whats possible in time.

I would gladly open my iMac and fit an SSD, but I bought Apple care with it since I got it at a 60% discount, I don't really don't wanna void it if it can be helped xD. Still, at least I can upgrade the ram to 32GB unlike the new 21.5''. Only gonna cost me 110 quid for that amount of ram.

This is a very common misconception about iMacs. You can open it up and add and SSD without voiding the warranty. The warranty states that the only "parts damaged due to" work completed by someone besides an authorized repair facility is not covered. I will get several people who will contradict this, but they clearly have NOT READ the Applecare warranty. Its clear. I read it before I upgraded mine.

 

[subsonix]

Systems with proper volume managers have been doing this since well before the turn of the century.

This "uncertainty principle" about what is really underneath an opaque block of storage is old news.

But that isn't the news here either, the interesting part is the automatic tiering. The whole concept of a volume is, and has always been an abstraction without a direct mapping to the underlaying storage. It can represent several drives, a drive somewhere on the network or not a drive or storage at all.

 

[guitarlord]

Is this even a 'macrumor'?

In other news, new graphics cards and SSDs work in older computers.

 

[AidenShaw]

...unless you were running another SSD-RAID of some sorts on Thunderbolt or through eSATA or something fast.....

Two SATA 6 Gbps drives would saturate T-Bolt, let alone 16.

Current eSATA limit would be even lower.

It would make more sense to simply make a single, larger, solid state HDD that ran at SATA speeds (6 Gbps).

And, putting different members of a volume in different locations (that is, one internal, other external) is a really, really bad idea.