Fusion drive using high capacity Sata SSD and lower capacity Nvme

[Axe_Meister]

Thinking of adding an external dock over 10Gb USB-C connection.
The one I have in mind has both a Sata drive slot and an Nvme slot.

In the past I've successfully created a fusion drive on an old intel iMac.
So I was thinking, what about a high capacity Sata SSD (say 4TB) + a smaller nvme drive (say 512GB)
as an accelerator.
Workload will be mainly music production so any one project is not likely to exceed 512GB.

 

[Fishrrman]

Creating a fusion drive is... my opinion only... asking for trouble down the line.
I sense that we're going to be seeing an increasing number of posts from users who have experienced "fusion drive failures" in the months to come.

Install two drives?
YES.

But... "let each drive be ITS OWN drive".

 

[chrfr]

Thinking of adding an external dock over 10Gb USB-C connection.
The one I have in mind has both a Sata drive slot and an Nvme slot.

In the past I've successfully created a fusion drive on an old intel iMac.
So I was thinking, what about a high capacity Sata SSD (say 4TB) + a smaller nvme drive (say 512GB)
as an accelerator.
Workload will be mainly music production so any one project is not likely to exceed 512GB.

Just use the drives separately. There's nothing to be gained by combining these two drives into one volume.

 

[rpmurray]

Just use the drives separately. There's nothing to be gained by combining these two drives into one volume.

I think the OP may believe they'd get the performance of an NVMe and the capacity of a larger SSD as an all in one solution, so a 4TB SSD with NVME speeds. But I would look at it more as if you would be building a RAID 0 and once one part fails (or has some other hiccup) you lose everything.

The OP may want to look at what the maximum throughput would be on the external dock. It could be that it is throttled at something like 750MB/s. So there would be no benefit.

 

[ignatius345]

It sounds like a fun experiment, but be aware that the Fusion Drive works by shuttling data constantly between the two drives -- moving active stuff onto the SSD (or I guess in your case the Nvme drive) and then back off again when something else is being used. That might vastly increase the amount of read/write cycles on your drives and kill them prematurely.

I had the SSD part of the Fusion Drive die in my last iMac, just from excessive read/write cycles. The poor little guy (128GB) was just worn out.

 

[chrfr]

I think the OP may believe they'd get the performance of an NVMe and the capacity of a larger SSD as an all in one solution, so a 4TB SSD with NVME speeds. But I would look at it more as if you would be building a RAID 0 and once one part fails (or has some other hiccup) you lose everything.

I also would not trust that the Fusion Drive logic properly knows how to determine which is the higher performance storage when both disks are SSDs.

 

[Axe_Meister]

Could be a good experiment. Big enterprise arrays these days are just this but with 3 layers. Nvme -->SAS SSD-->SaS spinning rust. From what I've been told by our IT guys is that these days it's the spinning rust drives that are more likely to fail.

 

[CausticPuppy]

10GBps USB-C is going to be the bottleneck for any NVME drive.

But it’s still plenty fast for music production.

Get a Crucial X8 4TB for $249. Done.

 

[genexx]

wrong thread, deleted.....

 

[MediaGary]

Thinking of adding an external dock over 10Gb USB-C connection.
The one I have in mind has both a Sata drive slot and an Nvme slot.

In the past I've successfully created a fusion drive on an old intel iMac.
So I was thinking, what about a high capacity Sata SSD (say 4TB) + a smaller nvme drive (say 512GB)
as an accelerator.
Workload will be mainly music production so any one project is not likely to exceed 512GB.

I had experimented with a Fusion Drive arrangement in my 2010 Mac Pro a few months before ultimately parting it out. I was running Big Sur 11.6.6 (via OCLP) and learned the following:

- Big Sur no longer allows/supports the CoreStorage commands to 'create' a Fusion Drive but will honor/use the Fusion Drive if it discovers a pre-existing one. I suspect this is also the case with Monterey and Ventura. I also suspect (based on the odd 'thrashing' described below) that the overall behavior of Fusion Drives may be different in Monterey/Ventura.

- My Fusion Drive was an ambitious 1TB NVMe combined with a RAID-0 8TB HDD pair, making for a ~17TB volume. The benchmarking went as expected, with the 1TB NVMe completely hiding the presence of the HDDs. However, in real usage as a media drive for DaVinci Resolve projects, there was a disturbing amount of 'thrashing' with onerous amounts of HDD activity when it was the destination drive for video output files. By thrashing, I mean I expected the relatively low data rate of writing ~100MByte/s but I could see ~900MByte/s via iStat menus.

In general, normal DAW project files on SATA connections do just fine, and there's little advantage to running those on NVMe. The sound and sample libraries of various soft-synth products do offer a performance advantage on NVMe drives, particularly on Thunderbolt, but the lower bandwidth of Gen2 USB (10Gbit/s) compresses the performance advantage of NVMe for the sample libraries.

I'll have to update my signature to reflect that I replaced the 2010 Mac Pro with an M1 Pro laptop. It's attached to a AkiTio Thunder3 Dock Pro that gives me eSATA to a 4-bay SATA tower, 10GbE, UHS-II SD, and 5Gbps USB ports. Also attached to the laptop is a Dual M.2 Sabrent EC-T3DN and a home-made 8TB Thunderbolt-to-U.2 NVMe in an old G-Tech enclosure.

I mention this to perhaps widen your view of what other drive connection options you can explore.