How to build your own fusion drive

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

brewing up your own fusion drive for your working Mac is far and away a worse idea than even calling it a horrible idea.

😊

Is that opinion based on personal experience?

Aren't Apple's Fusion drives using exactly the same corestorage set up? If there's some hardware difference that makes Apple's Fusion drives inherently more stable I'd be happy to hear about it. Or are you claiming all Fusion drives, Apple's included, are inherently unstable?

That doesn't seem to be the consensus of opinion from my reading, but I'd be interested to hear any rational, evidence-based arguments to the contrary.

I never mentioned any mfg. of Fusion drive, Apple or otherwise... Rather home brew experimentation on ones primary computer as a bad idea.

As such you were inferring things regarding statement I never made.

as to your last, the Greek philosophers said that there has "never been truth gained by consensus"

peace.

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

I never mentioned any mfg. of Fusion drive, Apple or otherwise... Rather home brew experimentation on ones primary computer as a bad idea.

I understand that, Plotinus. My point was that a 'homebrew' fusion drive is no different from an Apple Fusion drive as far as I understand it - they both use the same corestorage disk management system. So my point was that your claim that it was a bad idea to use a fusion drive on your primary system seems to be implying either that:

i. there's something about Apple's H/W that makes an Apple Fusion drive inherently more stable than making your own; or

ii. Apple's Fusion drives use some s/w instead of, or in addition to, corestorage that is not available to the 'homebrewer'; or

iii. Apple's Fusion drives are just as unstable as homebrewed ones.

Of course, if you don't know what corestorage is and are not familiar with the technical details, that's OK. I'm researching this topic and am looking for people who can inform me.

Peace indeed. I'm rather fond of the Greeks philosophers myself. Socrates always made a point of asking and listening to the "experts'" opinions before offering his own analysis. 😉

Thanks. The choice for me (and probably I guess anyone else installing an small SSD (120GB) and data doubler!) is whether to pare down my central user account to less than 90GB and use the second internal drive for less used files, or to attempt some kind of Fusion set up.

Either is OK, and I may play with both ideas; I'm just looking for the best speed really. I keep multiple redundant, synchronous and asynchronous backups so I'm not worried about data loss. I'm more concerned with how stable the system is in terms of kernal panics, BSOD and crashes. I can't tolerate any of those.

Obviously point i. is true. Apple builds fusion drives that way at the factory using components that have been tested and verified. When you crack open your machine, remove some parts, and add some new ones, it is no longer a device manufactured or supported by Apple. Whether it works or not is based on your own skill with hardware hacking and the relative compatibility of your 3rd party hardware and the amenablity of your Apple hardware to repurposing. Some people have reported success and some people have reported failure.

Your statement that a homebrew fusion drive is "no different" than an Apple one is clearly false.

etresoft The 905

Your statement that a homebrew fusion drive is "no different" than an Apple one is clearly false.

Thank you, that was MY point exactly. 😊

Softwater seems to be attempting to extract a mobius loop of inference re: a statement about "home brewing your mac" as equal to or slanting the factory Apple Fusion drive.

softwater ประเทศไทย

on your primary system seems to be implying either that:--------iii. Apple's Fusion drives are just as unstable as homebrewed ones.

No such claim was made, implied, directed, or should be inferred.

To quote the Thai กระต่ายหมายจันทร์

as meaning ultimately, you can home brew your Fusion drive,...see how it goes......, but us other folks will buy one. 😊

กันไว้ดีกว่าแก้

Peace to you in Thailand 😍

Hey, thats a brilliant video, Ill have to try that some time on my older macbook Pro 😊

etresoft wrote:

Your statement that a homebrew fusion drive is "no different" than an Apple one is clearly false.

And yet, as you know full well, I have made no such statement. I asked whether the previous poster was implying that.

It's still unclear to me why he, or anyone else, thinks that a homebrewed fusion drive is unreliable, nor have either of you said anything about the difference between Apple's fusion drives and one you put together yourself. Yes, I understand the former have obviously been tested by Apple, but tested for what exactly?

AFAICT, 'fusion drive' is a software solution (and therefore any compatible hard disks should work just as well as any that Apple re-brands and sticks their name on). If I'm wrong about that, great. Please enlighten me as to how.

I bought a kit from OWC which includes the SSD and the caddy. What I can't get to the bottom of is the "To Trim or not to Trim?" debate.

What did you do?

Great reply, thanks. 🙂 √

OK, all done. Seems stable enough so far after repeated restarts and 24hrs of testing. I'll let you all know if that changes.

As for the speed, apps are noticeably faster at loading, but I'm a bit disappointed that boot up time is still relatively slow. Booting from an external USB 2.0 disk = 47 seconds from chime to login prompt. Booting from my new internal SSD/Fusion set up 35 seconds. I was hoping for a lot faster than that.

iostat confirms the SSD is doing most of the work, so I'm not really sure why that is. Maybe it's just having an old dual core MBP from 2009. 😟

Regarding TRIM, I've tried it with it both enabled and disabled. I suspect the boot up time is slightly faster (3-4 seconds) with TRIM off, but that's not enough for me to turn it off. Otherwise, at this stage, I see no difference with it on or off.

Incidentally, in order to aid repeated testing, I also added one-click TRIM enable/disabling to my own free utility app 'FastTasks'. Anyone interested can search for it on MacUpdate or contact me off list by clicking on my profile and I'll send you a free copy.

I know its newer than your machine, but for comparison my 2012 13" i7 MBP gets to login screen in <15 seconds. After login I see desktop in 10 seconds, and that includes restoring of Safari, Mail, Calendar, iTunes and a bunch of other stuff and spinning up an external USB that is used for TM backups.

I've been with the home-brew fusion for a year now but do recall that first boot after install. It felt like my boot times were cut in half. Best $100 ever spent.