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kamaaina2010 Author

Level 1

8 points

How to build your own fusion drive

So, after the new announcement of FUSION drive, I am wondering if it is possible to create your own FUSION drive setup on an older machine like my MBP. Since many people replace the original HDD with a SSD and swap the optical drive for the HDD, it seems we may have the hardware components of a FUSION drive available right there.

Now, if OS X ML comes with this special edition of disk utility that supports FUSION drive, or we could download it somewhere, the question is, if we can stitch this together in a way that you have a nice real fusion drive there. It seems having an extra partition on the hard drive for Bootcamp shall be OK, but it seems you cannot partition the flash drive. I could live with this. But instead of having two seperate drives it would be very cool to "fuse" them together to one fusion drive and have ML move the software according to what's used the most.

Has anybody made this work on an older machine yet? Any thoughts?

Posted on Oct 27, 2012 6:08 PM

Best reply

mende1

Level 10

93,538 points

Posted on Oct 27, 2012 7:30 PM

The problem with Fusion Drive is that it uses flash memory, not a SSD disk, so it's near impossible to do it, and more when you need a special OS X version for the Macs compatible with Fusion Drive

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33 replies

etresoft

Level 8

46,384 points

Oct 4, 2013 10:21 AM in response to donreith

That is my big complaint about the home-brew fusion drives. You spent $100 and how much time? I get performance like that from my hybrid drive. I suppose if you enjoy tinkering and your machine is out of warranty, you can do what you want with it. But if you just want a fusion drive in an older machine with little fuss, hybrid drives aren't half bad.

donreith

Level 1

47 points

Oct 4, 2013 1:06 PM in response to etresoft

The Seagate Momentus that I put into my previous MBP was simply underwhelming. Nowhere near SSD performance. And it died within 14 months. As far as time, putting the fusion drive into the MBP was marginally more effort than swapping out a stock HD for an SSD. Its not a big deal. When Haswell MacMinis come out I'll likely do a DIY fusion with them.

But for my work MBP I don't need tons of storage - photos and media live on the Mac at home. So in hindsight I should have just put in 256Gb SSD.

softwater

Level 5

5,556 points

Oct 5, 2013 1:45 AM in response to donreith

Thanks, Don. I also have a Seagate Momentus (it's now in the DVD bay).

Anyway, good news is I've got that boot time down to 17 seconds, which is more like what I was hoping for and about as fast as it'll get on my machine I guess.

The "trick" was actually setting the Fusion drive as the startup disk in System Prefs > Startup Disk. I hadn't bothered doing that because it was automatically booting to the correct OS right after install (albeit slowly) anyway.

I noticed after doing a restart with option key that the startup disk manager was listing both a 'Fusion' and a 'Fusion 2' disk - in other words, it was seeeing two disks where there should have only been one. I couldn't find this 'Fusion 2' drive anywhere else - not in Diskutil list or in the Startup Disk prefs.

However, once I specifially set the Startup Disk as the Fusion drive, boot times sped up to the now very pleasing 17 seconds!

As for time messing about with the system, it took me less than 45 minutes to install the SSD and swap the Momentus over to the drive bay, about 10 minutes to set up the Fusion corestorage file system and then a couple of hours to clone my backup onto the new Fusion drive.

Cost in time < 3..5 hours

Cost in $ < $180

Time and money well spent, IMO. 🙂

How to build your own fusion drive