Fusion Drive...worth it?

[TahoeDust]

I have a 13" Mid-2009 MBP 2.54ghz Core 2 Duo, with 8gb 1066 ram...this thing has been a tank. Currently I have a 250gb Samsung 840 SSD in the HDD slot and a 500gb 7200rpm HDD in the optical drive spot. Right now I keep the OS, Apps, and projects I am working on on the SSD. I keep media such as pics, vids, and music on the HDD. I just read a write up on how to setup a fusion drive on this machine and combining everything onto one logical drive would be a little more convenient...I guess. I have a few questions though.

Is this worth doing?
Will this make the OS/Apps run slower?
If one disc fails, do I lose everything like a Raid 0 array?
Pros?
Cons?

 

[dusk007]

1. IMO not. It is tedious and all it gets you is not having to manually manage the media on an extra drive. Move more stuff over to the 240GB SSD until it is almost full. Movies are usually to big but most people don't have monstrous music libraries and picture libraries one can also split into a current one and archives of old stuff.
2. Not really it is pretty much the same. All the data shuffling happens in the background. For the most part performance should be the same.
3. Kind of yes. Which is why I wouldn't recommend it. If there existed tools data on one drive should be recoverable. It is not actually split up into small chunks like a raid 0 but afaik the fusion drive becomes unusable and inaccessible since it runs on a still low enough data layer to be a problem. In theory data recovery should be possible but I know of no tools that help and Apple I guess expects you to just have a Timemachine backup. One drive fails all data of the unified virtual disk is effectively gone.
4. The only pro is you have a unified single partition to deal with and data all the more likely to be used data is on the SSD.
5. Con is that one drive failure leads to virtual disk's death.
Also bootcamp becomes slightly more problematic. It is a bit tedious to set up and even more tedious if you properly want to set up bootcamp. The Apple wizard would exile bootcamp to the HDD which is an idiotic setup for a partition you need to boot quite often either to restart into for gaming, programs or to launch a VM. Bootcamp is the last thing I would want on the HDD unless I only need every couple of weeks.