iMac - NVME w/ SATA - Fusion or Split? 2017 i7 Running Slow

Question

jvah1980 Author

Level 1

8 points

iMac - NVME w/ SATA - Fusion or Split? 2017 i7 Running Slow

Looking for any advice or opinions.

I upgraded a 2012 i7, 2G Video, 1TB Fusion (128G SSD, 1TB SATA), 24G RAM - to a 2017 5k 27" iMac, 512G NVME, 8G Radeon, 40G RAM, 3TB SATA drive (upgraded by authorized reseller at time of sale).

I've been relatively disappointed ever since. Overall, the 2012 just felt smoother and faster. The new iMac I setup as two separate drives (512G NVME, and 3TB SATA). I'm wondering if this was a mistake?

Using apps like Premiere seems unbearable. I'm constantly starting at a beach ball listening to the SATA drive click and clack away. Obviously CPU only tasks (like rendering out videos) is significantly faster, but just general navigation off apps seems slower.

I wanted a total of 4TB of storage since I do primarily video work. I'm tempted to upgrade the NVMe to a 2TB stick, and the SATA drive to a 2TB SSD - it would run about $800.- I'd be keeping my 4TB config but now have all solid state storage.

However, I wonder if maybe prior to that, I should reformat and go back to the fusion configuration between the current NVMe And a SATA drive. After all - that was a similar configuration I had on my 2012 version which ran very well (with only the occasional pause while the SATA drive would power up).

Any opinions or thoughts on this?

iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 21, 2019 1:15 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

jvah1980 Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 24, 2019 7:27 AM in response to HWTech

Thanks folks!

Just to close this out - I did resetup the computer as a fusion drive, and it does seem to make for a much more pleasant and faster experience.

One word of note, there is a flaw in Apple's instructions for setting up the fusion drives in Catalina. They state to simply run "diskutil resetFusion" command from terminal window in Recovery Mode (article here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207584)

In my experience this command failed. It deleted both of my drives, and then failed to create the fusion drive. I ended up having to install Catalina from a USB stick that I created on another machine. It was quite a headache. In the end, it seems like the issue is that you can partition and 'fusion' the drive that Recovery is running from (which makes a lot of sense). I'm surprised Apple doesn't mention this in the article.

Thanks!

Reply

Answer 2

Jeff Donald

Level 8

44,946 points

Dec 21, 2019 2:32 PM in response to jvah1980

I have a similar setup, 2017 iMac, 64Gb of RAM, etc. I put all my media on one of these,

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3EX4M2SL/

I have four 1TB NVMe M.2, so a total of 4 TB of storage connected by Thunderbolt 3. The only downside is for maximum speed you must fill all four slots in RAID zero. This is blazingly fast though.

This drive is backed up to a 4TB HDD nightly. The SSD RAID 0 holds all my project files and when I’m done I off load the files to a 14TB HDD for archiving. My operating system (Catalina) and apps are on a 128 GB SSD that I split from a 2TB Fusion.

In my experience the Fusion drives get slow when trying to do longer video clips, multiple streams and high resolution (4K and higher). They can be very fast when dealing with images files, but video can just bog it down.

Reply

Answer 3

HWTech

Level 9

69,242 points

Dec 21, 2019 6:40 PM in response to jvah1980

jvah1980 wrote:

either of you know if it wasn’t originally fused can I still (Mojave) just boot to the terminal and run the fuse command? (I know it warns it deletes both drives) so I assume it’s just formatting then as a fusion?

Yes you can create the Fusion Drive from Recovery Mode or from a USB installer. It will erase everything on both drives.

Reply

Answer 4

jvah1980 Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 21, 2019 2:18 PM in response to Jeff Donald

Jeff - all my apps run off SSD. Dats files (including video content) off SATA.

rk - I realized with everything on my system backed up its easy enough for me to just fuse the drives, reinstall apps and copy data back over. I’m going to give it a try.

either of you know if it wasn’t originally fused can I still (Mojave) just boot to the terminal and run the fuse command? (I know it warns it deletes both drives) so I assume it’s just formatting then as a fusion?

Reply