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Create your own "Fusion Drive" in your Mac Mini

That-Guy

That-Guy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 25, 2012
662
57
UK
Just come across THIS GUIDE to create a Fusion like drive and its got me thinking :D

Do you think this will be very reliable?

Do you think its worth the hassle while installing Mountain Lion?

I was thinking about having an 128gb SSD as my boot drive and the original 500gb HDD as my Data/Storage drive.
 
I run an SSD and harddrive in my Macbook Pro, and don't see any reason to "fuse" them together...
 
Quite a few articles out on that. Yes, I plan to give it a shot, but I'm going to wait a little bit to see what if any issues crop up for folks.
 
Seems to me without the software logic to move most used apps to flash, the only thing this trick will do is slow down the SSD. I'd be interested to see before and after results for this hack.
 
jmxp69 said:
Seems to me without the software logic to move most used apps to flash, the only thing this trick will do is slow down the SSD. I'd be interested to see before and after results for this hack.
Click to expand...

That "moving" stuff happens automagically once the disks are fused.
 
Pakaku said:
I run an SSD and harddrive in my Macbook Pro, and don't see any reason to "fuse" them together...
Click to expand...

My thought exactly. I just have an SSD (no other regular drives in it) but I don't see why I'd like to lose more control on my machine...
 
I've ordered a Mini with a 1TB drive, with the intention to add an SSD in the near future, and making it a Fusion Drive.

Is there any downside to this though?
 
dasx said:
My thought exactly. I just have an SSD (no other regular drives in it) but I don't see why I'd like to lose more control on my machine...
Click to expand...

And I just thought of something: what happens to one drive if the other one fails? Does it work like a RAID-0, RAID-1, or something else?
 
oYx said:
That "moving" stuff happens automagically once the disks are fused.
Click to expand...

Still would like to see some benchmark results.

Edit: Seems the block level tiering happens in in Core Storage, so this looks legit.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/more-on-fusion-drive-how-it-works-and-how-to-roll-your-own/


Momentus XT Hybrid drives used firmware on the drive itself to redirect frequently used data to flash which is why I thought there might be a drive firmware dependency.

"Seagates Adaptive Memory™ technology uses algorithms to monitor data usage in real time, ensuring frequently used data is stored in the NAND flash memory and dramatically improving system-level performance."
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-xt-hybrid/
 
Last edited:
Pakaku said:
And I just thought of something: what happens to one drive if the other one fails? Does it work like a RAID-0, RAID-1, or something else?
Click to expand...

My guess is it's neither of those. It's just as if it was one single drive. So if it fails, it fails. Period. (just like if a regular 1TB drive failed).

It's nice and all but I don't get why would anyone really wanna emulate this when they already got an SSD and an HDD. The ability to choose what you put in what disk is better than a SO making the decision for you.
 
shinji said:
Anyone have an answer for this? Nothing about it in the Apple documentation either http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446 but apparently any Mac with a Fusion drive comes with a unique version of Disk Utility...
Click to expand...

A Fusion Drive is technically more fragile than a single device. If one of the components fails, it's toast.

The Disk Utility that will be in 10.8.3 will handle the creation and management of Fusion Drives in a GUI, but you can do all that with CLI now.

Just look at the posted guides and get familiar with the diskutil 'cs' commands.

The biggest benefit for my MacBook Pro was giving me one large volume that functionally has the same speed of an SSD. (240GB SSD + 500GB HDD)
 
I'm interested in doing this with my MBP (and maybe 2011 mini), but I want to see more reviews of it and I'm a bit worried that once Apple releases 10.8.3 they will find a way to disable the mod. They've done it before by breaking third party TRIM support (although the developers figured out how to reinstate it). I also watched a Blackmagic speed test of the DIY Fusion Drive and the speeds were extremely slow. That doesn't mean that it's not fast in real world use.

The speed tests start at about the 5 minute mark:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_odnNpv-FQ
 
So, is the BYO 1TB Fusion drive offered by Apple nothing more than a 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD pre-setup using Core Storage utilities. Meaning this DIY method would be exactly what you get when you order the 1TB Fusion Drive option from Apple?
 
bbucy said:
So, is the BYO 1TB Fusion drive offered by Apple nothing more than a 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD pre-setup using Core Storage utilities. Meaning this DIY method would be exactly what you get when you order the 1TB Fusion Drive option from Apple?
Click to expand...

That's the theory. All indicators are that the Fusion Drive is a separate SSD and HD combined with Core Storage. But there is no way of knowing if this will be supported by Apple in future releases of Mac OS X, meaning they could shut down the third-party support...
 
I also have questions about backups, such as, if we make a Time Machine backup of the Fusion Drive, and Apple kills DIY Fusion in a later update, it appears that after we reformat the hard drives there is no way to separate the data on the Time Machine backup to the two now separate drives. The only solution to that would be a fresh OS install and using Migration assistant to move apps/documents/etc. from the Time Machine backup onto the two separate drives.

That's not a total nightmare, but enough of a problem to make me want to sit this out until we know more. I moved to Macs from a Hackintosh because I got tired of constantly having to play catch up to Apple's updates that broke the Hackintosh settings. For the average user who just wants something that works and isn't keen on tinkering, this is not something they should be messing with.
 
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