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Apple's New Fusion Drive Works on Older Macs
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If you have let's say a MacBook Pro with one of these 750GB hybrid drives with 8GB SSD cache, or with an ordinary 750 GB hard drive, you can add an SSD drive and turn the whole thing into a Fusion Drive. The Fusion Drive software doesn't care that one of the two drives is a hybrid drive. I doubt that you will get any speed gain from having a hybrid drive, because the most critical 128 GB of data will be on the SSD, so there will be very little gain from the tiny 8 GB SSD cache connected to the hard drive.
And I wonder what happens if either disk temporarily disappears - does it recover or is it time for a bare metal restore?
Yes, that would be a lot safer.
Another thing to keep in mind is that "Fusion Drive" consists of two entirely separate components. One is combining two drives into one. The other part is moving files between slow blocks and fast blocks. If someone built an external drive consisting of a small SSD and a large HD, with no attempts at doing anything clever, and the file moving part of Fusion Drive could be turned on, you would get the full advantage of a Fusion Drive.
This is very interesting and i seriously want to try this on my mid 2010 15" MBP. Having read most of the 8 pages, i still have a couple of questions on my mind.
First is, according to risottos guide (and to common logic) you need to wipe both of your drives (SSD and HDD) before installing the LVM. What confuses me is when a time machine backup is created while there was 1 physical drive with 1 partition and when you restore from backup with 2 physical drives + 1 partition, how does it not get confused? I mean it has to get the actual OS on the SSD to make it run fast obviously, but seeing it as 1 partition, how does it actually know? or is that what fusion drive is, it's that smart? Also i am confused on how the internet recovery partition will work with this.
Second thing is the risk this setup has on crashing. If the OS sees it as 1 partition, when either the SSD or the HDD fails, crashes, gets broken, the whole system gets corrupt. Isn't that more risk and with this you have to use time machine, but you will need a bigger time machine storage considering system will have 1 TB HDD, 128 GB SSD.
I am no computer geek that knows a lot about these kinds of issues but being able to do this would increase the performance a lot of my 2.5 year old MBP. I think i'll try this after more tests are done and is compared with an actual fusion drive. I've used the optical drive 4-5 times since i bought this MBP anyway.
First is, according to risottos guide (and to common logic) you need to wipe both of your drives (SSD and HDD) before installing the LVM. What confuses me is when a time machine backup is created while there was 1 physical drive with 1 partition and when you restore from backup with 2 physical drives + 1 partition, how does it not get confused? I mean it has to get the actual OS on the SSD to make it run fast obviously, but seeing it as 1 partition, how does it actually know? or is that what fusion drive is, it's that smart? Also i am confused on how the internet recovery partition will work with this.
Second thing is the risk this setup has on crashing. If the OS sees it as 1 partition, when either the SSD or the HDD fails, crashes, gets broken, the whole system gets corrupt. Isn't that more risk and with this you have to use time machine, but you will need a bigger time machine storage considering system will have 1 TB HDD, 128 GB SSD.
I am no computer geek that knows a lot about these kinds of issues but being able to do this would increase the performance a lot of my 2.5 year old MBP. I think i'll try this after more tests are done and is compared with an actual fusion drive. I've used the optical drive 4-5 times since i bought this MBP anyway.
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.
Answering to myself; decided to put Time Machine behind SCSI/RAID instead. SSD and HDD are now internal. Fusion hack seems to work as advertised.
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Good question! Will it? I don't know. But I'm guessing it will. It's one of OS X's core features. It would be pretty bad if it didn't work on the new Fusion Drives. But I don't know for sure.
Finder showed "Encrypt volume" in a context menu, and clicking it indeed started the encryption. Also confirmed via command line that it was ongoing. I canceled the process, but looked like it was going to work.
I've got no idea. You certainly don't seem to *want* one, so the idea that you're buying one anyway is a bit mind-boggling.
I know I don't want one, thats why I bought the previous gen
Time Machine sees one volume. It doesn't know that there is a Fusion Drive somewhere. Just like it will restore to an encrypted volume, it doesn't know anything about it, and it doesn't care. It tells the operating system "write this file" and the operating system writes it.
When you restore from Time Machine, everything is put somewhere on that Fusion Drive. As you use it, things that you use are moved to SSD, things that you don't use are moved away from it. The whole OS will probably not be on the SSD, because there are plenty of bits that you never use. Like everything comes in 20 languages, the 19 or 18 languages that you never use will be on the hard drive. Of the 200 printer drivers, the 198 that you don't use will be on the hard drive.
Just performed the transition from 1 HDD and 1 SSD to a "fusion drive" using the instructions provided, worked with no issues. Had to perform a full install Mountain Lion, all good. The problem is when I check the app store for update it states no updates available!! I know there have been some, as I installed them in the past. when trying to log into the app store account with user id and password I get the message app store temporary unavailable. Checking the console i see the message "App Store[192]: FRWebDelegate: Received http status code 500 on response"
Anyone else had this issue?
Update: now working ok, bust have been an apple apps store glitch!!
Anyone else had this issue?
Update: now working ok, bust have been an apple apps store glitch!!
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Wrong forum... OS X doesn't use "letter" for drive name/mount path. Your comment is a fail
I'm running it on Early 2008 Mac Pro. It essentially took those 2 commands as described in the article and now there's a drive called Fusion.
Missing parts were to figure out the disk numbers, use "diskutil list" for that. And for formatting the volume, you need the ID behind "Logical Volume" using command "diskutil cs list". Using Intel SSD and Seagate HDD, both internal. SSD is just hanging in there, I don't have a cradle.
So the commands for me were:
diskutil list (to get the disk numbers, in my case 4 and 0, #4 being the SSD)
diskutil cs create Fusion disk4 disk0 (to create a new volume, unformatted)
diskutil cs list (to find the volume ID)
diskutil cs createVolume 6B3D1709-EAF5-4E8C-B51B-3FED5EB17E00 jhfs+ Fusion 1100g (to format it)
Blue text are variables that you need to set for your system. Fusion is the name I gave for the drive.
Be careful with those disk numbers. Get them wrong and you will format the wrong disk. Disconnect your Time Machine before these commands in case things blow up.
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That almost certainly doesn't have anything to do with the 'Fusion drive' you created. The app store has been acting up for me, too.
Its not rocket science where dealing with here......
Apple needs to learn. If theres a way, people will find it
Huh? The only reason people are able to do this, is because Apple created this functionality in the first place. Whether you consider it rocket science or not, you still have Apple to thank for it.
It should, since Filevault 2 also uses CoreStorage.
Based on how Apple does Time Machine backups, I would not be surprised if Fusion works at the file level and not the block level. So if the HDD failed, you might still have access to the SSD and could boot the system (since core OS files will always be on it due to usage patterns) and read whatever data is on it. Or if the SSD fails, you might be able to use Target Disk Mode from another OS X 10.8.2 machine to connect to the HDD and read the data.
Thanks. I'll test it out on a couple of HDDs since I don't have a 3.5" SSD right now.
Interesting development. I would like to purchase a thunderbolt ssd and using that with the existing internal hard drive to create my own fusion drive. I will wait to see if this develops into a stable solution over the next few months.
Actually, I would hope not....
Much of the core OS isn't used, and of what is used quite a bit is touched once during boot and then never referenced again (e.g. a kernel driver is loaded into resident kernel memory during boot and never referenced again until the next boot, or boot-time initialization and loader programs).
One would hope that these files stay on the rotating HDD, and aren't moved into the solid state HDD - wasting space that could be used for files that are repeatedly referenced.
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Which brings up the question of "what is the boot partition"?
The BIOS has to load the OS from somewhere, and at least enough of the OS has to be on that partition to load and start the "fusion" layer.
Much of the core OS isn't used, and of what is used quite a bit is touched once during boot and then never referenced again (e.g. a kernel driver is loaded into resident kernel memory during boot and never referenced again until the next boot, or boot-time initialization and loader programs).
One would hope that these files stay on the rotating HDD, and aren't moved into the solid state HDD - wasting space that could be used for files that are repeatedly referenced.
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Which brings up the question of "what is the boot partition"?
The BIOS has to load the OS from somewhere, and at least enough of the OS has to be on that partition to load and start the "fusion" layer.
This is awesome. So the 1100g is roughly the size of both drives combined?
I have a 2008 Early Mac Pro and this an amazing upgrade for it.
I have a 2008 Early Mac Pro and this an amazing upgrade for it.
Yes - 1000 GB + 128 GB = 1128 GB
It's simply the sum of the two partitions (apparently the solid state HDD partition is the entire drive, the spinning HDD partition can be a subset of spinning HDD to allow dual-booting or other things).
