Maverick DIY fusion drive

[cslmac]

I have a mid 2012 15 in MBP with a 2.3 ghz intel i7
16 GB of memory (yeah i know a little overkill)
also WD 5200 1tb hd
Software OS X 10.9 (13A603) Maverick

The question i have is that i want to do a fusion drive to really boost my computers performance, OR just instal an SSD. How buggy is a DIY fusion drive on maverick? Also how hard is it to do?

Currently i have a bootcamp and would not want to lose that at all.
So Can i do a fusion drive and keep my bootcamp?

Ive been looking at the Samsung SSD's the 840 pro and the 840 Evo. I like the 500gb or above option because I have a lot of movies and am in the process of inporting the rest of my dvd library as well as my families, onto my computer.


Sorry for the scattered thoughts.

 

[Rian Gray]

I guess this will be a good article to consider. It's from OWC blog.
http://blog.macsales.com/17624-os-x...tup-option-for-non-fusion-drive-equipped-macs

I'm running my late 2012 iMac with 32gb memory, and honestly never expected i needed more than 16gb in my work this desperately. I can actually feel the difference dramatically.

Anyhow, like past posts —I believe there were other posts that discussed DIY fusion drive—*have mentioned it multiple times, I don't think I can recommend DIY fusion drive with ease. It is obviously faster; my iMac with fusion drive is showing near-SSD speeds in read/write. But I'm still not so sure what kind of risk I'm taking with fusion drive.

 

[haravikk]

Setting up a Fusion Drive would definitely be my preferred solution, but it's also not for the faint of heart as there's going to be Terminal work plus a bit of juggling involved.

To give you an idea, the basic steps involved are:

• Create a bootable copy of OS X on another partition/disk that you won't be erasing, as creating your Fusion Drive from the Recovery Partition doesn't seem to be very reliable (dunno if that's improved for Mavericks?).
• Make sure your data is backed up (of course).
• Wipe all partitions/drives that you want to combine into your Fusion Drive. You should be able to leave your Bootcamp volume untouched.
• You may not have to do this, but I had to add some steps to get the recovery partition to be created properly.
• Create a new Core Storage logical volume group containing your SSD (first) and any other drives/partitions you want to add.
• Create a new logical volume.
• Install OS X onto it, or clone from a backup.

As I mentioned above, I had a lot of issues getting the installer to create the recovery partition for me, so what I did was performed a normal install onto my SSD, then wiped the partition and created the core storage volume and installed again, this made sure the recovery partition was there already when I went to install on the new fusion drive, but it also meant that I lost some of the SSD to the recovery partition; I had originally hoped to put that on an HDD instead to maximise the fast SSD part of the drive.

 

[Manic Harmonic]

I would just like to add that if you're worried about the boot camp partition, use winclone to back it up first.

 

[cslmac]

havarick

Thanks for the information. I am not sure on the stability of the fusion drive on maverick either, thats almost my only hang up. The terminal work doesn't really phase me... it actually seems fairly strait forward, as long as there is a good guide that is.

The only other worry is the bootcamp... as well as the things on my MBP. I just am a little lazy and don't want to install all the apps again on the mac side. The windows side i was thinking I would be able to clone and then install again.


Thank you for your help.