cMBP Dual Drive Users - Anyone using Fusion Drive? Any issues with it?

[KittyKatta]

I had a 2nd drive installed in my cMBP 2012 optical bay so now i have a 256GB SSD and 500GB HDD. I dont mind managing files on two drives, but I am curious if anyone with this setup is doing the Fusion Drive thing. And if not, why AREN'T you going with a Fusion Drive?

I want to make sure I get as many opinions as possible before making a decision so thanks for any help and info.

 

[hfg]

I have created a DIY Fusion drive on my late 2011 Macbook Pro using a 256GB SSD and the original 750GB 7200rpm hard disk. I devoted 100GB of the SSD for Windows 8. I have also done it with a 512GB SSD with part again devoted to Windows.

It worked well, until I had to reinstall Windows, and couldn't do it without re-installing the optical disk. I also had to re-install the optical disk in order to perform a firmware update to the SSD. This was made more difficult because I couldn't simply remove the hard disk and boot from the SSD while the optical disk was installed.

However, in retrospect, I might have been able to put the hard disk portion of the Fusion drive in a Thunderbolt enclosure and still boot, or I probably really didn't have a need to boot to OS X since I was working from OS environments loaded from the optical disk.

With that being said ... I am currently running non-Fusion with separate SSD and Hard Disk and managing the files manually, although I am tempted to rejoin them as a Fusion sometime in the future.

Anyway ... my $ .02 🙂


-howard