DIY Fusion Drive on MacBookPro8,2

And, I don't want replies from arrogant and rude people like yourself. Dont' act smart about something you know little about or a lot about. You just come off as someone we don't wish to know.

And, why would you assume I have no experience with an FD?

Please post, here or elsewhere, your experience with creating an FD on older hardware, and how in your tests you found it to be inferior to your suggested configuration. I'd be interested to read your results.

Why should I bother entertaining your arrogance, Linc, here or elsewhere.

Thanks, that tells me what I wanted to know.

Kappy needs to stop hijacking threads: it's bad, bad 'net behavior. If you have an opinion, state it once, then move on.

Anyway, thanks for starting this thread, danibjor. I have a macbookpro8,2 and tried a DIY Fusion Drive. My MBPro is a 2.2GHz i7 processor and both of my SATA controllers are 6G, although OWC says there is indeed weirdness with this MBPro, even if both controllers are listed as 6G.

If you're contributing here, it's important to post your exact specs because "macbookpro8,2" has a ton of different configurations: it's not a unique identifier.

I have a 750GB 7200RPM hard disk on the main controller and a OWC 240GB 3G drive (because OWC said a 6G drive probably wouldn't work in the DVD drive bay.

So I cloned my original drive to an external disk, then I created the Fusion Drive with no problems at all. I cloned the external drive back to the Fusion Drive and it also went well.

After removing the external and booting from the Fusion Drive, however, I started seeing delays, just in the Finder and such. I looked in the Console and sure enough there was an occasional "disk i/o error" on the fusion drive during the slow times. I have diglloyd's Disk Tester suite, so I fired it up and ran some read/write tests and sure enough they consistently cause a disk i/o error. I've run it for a couple of days now, to see if the i/o errors clear up, but they're continuing, causing an occasional beachball-freeze of the entire machine. It clears up after a minute or two.

So the machine is still usable, but I'm not comfortable using it with disk i/o errors happening on a continuing basis, so I'm going to do a split drive with the OS being on the SSD and the user folder being on the HD, using it that way until it's time to get a new MBPro that will support a Fusion Drive reliably. OS X now supports splitting the OS and Users folder between two drives, so it's not a "hack" any more. It's not as good as a Fusion Drive (shaddup, Kappy), but it will do for now.

Considering this and the other experiences with the macbookpro8,2 series that I've seen here and elsewhere, I'd say don't expect a Fusion Drive to run properly on this particular model. 😟

Hard to be the hijacker when I was the first responder. But then thank you for your friendly thoughts and rude behavior.

LOL, whatever Kappy. Responding first with the classic-but-useless "Why are you wasting your time doing that?" thread hijack isn't any better than waiting until other people have responded with useful replies. And once your original question is answered, continuing to contribute useless replies along the same lines is just being stubbornly useless. To answer your question, for some reason Apple's Storage Engineering Team thought that the concept of a Fusion Drive was a useful addition to being able to have the OS on an SSD and the Users folder on an HD, and they spent tons of time creating, testing and deploying it in OS X. Go argue with them, silly person, not us. And think of how many threads there are to troll elsewhere! I hear them calling you.

Anyway again, here's more info for anyone that's interested in the underlying cause of the Fusion Drive issue. I'm seeing this in the Console's All Messages database just before the disk i/o errors. This error appears in many threads unrelated to Fusion Drives, some with optical drives, so I'm pretty sure it's just more info on what caused the disk i/o error.

<timestamp> kernel[0]: CoreStorageGroup::completeIORequest - error 0xe00002ca detected for LVG "LogicalVolGroup1" (54A264C5-B34C-41FB-843E-1EF20B7B26F6), pv 1893C933-DA4D-485E-9DF8-5E06C95C81AF, near LV byte offset = 16621633536.

So you have a Late 2011 15" MBP as both the early and late models have the 8.2 identifier?

So it would seem that even thought the late 8.2 models list 6GBs SATA3 on the optical bay it has been limited in some way by Apple. Actually I ran into this myself with my late 8.2 when I tried to install a SSD in the optical bay.

To all that try the FD, Good Luck.

P.S.

We all know about that other poster.

JohnDCCIU wrote:

for some reason Apple's Storage Engineering Team thought that the concept of a Fusion Drive was a useful addition to being able to have the OS on an SSD and the Users folder on an HD, and they spent tons of time creating, testing and deploying it in OS X. Go argue with them, silly person, not us.

If Apple's Storage Engineering Team thought it would be a good idea to support a Fusion Drive on a 2 year-old machine with 3rd party components, then they would have given you some way to do that.

And speaking of hijacking threads, this is a user-to-user tech support forum. Unless you have a definitive answer for danibjor, then you are the one hijacking this thread.

etresoft wrote:

If Apple's Storage Engineering Team thought it would be a good idea to support a Fusion Drive on a 2 year-old machine with 3rd party components, then they would have given you some way to do that.

And speaking of hijacking threads, this is a user-to-user tech support forum. Unless you have a definitive answer for danibjor, then you are the one hijacking this thread.

OMG, there's another troll in this thread? Geez.

Apple did provide such a way: it's called the diskutil command-line utility with the corestorage verb. It's perfectly legitimate part of the 10.8.2 system and no "hack" is required to use it to create a Fusion Drive on an older system, something which many people are doing successfully. Please go away unless you have something useful to contribute, other than just joining Kappy in useless naysaying.

While I don't have a definitive answer for danibjor, I'm contributing my experience with a similar machine in creating a Fusion Drive, as he asked about. That's on-topic and not thread hijacking.

Update on my attempt at a Fusion Drive....the bottom line is that I may just have a bad OWC SSD drive and it may not be an issue with the Fusion Drive technology after all.

I booted from my original clone and destroyed the LVG, ending up with my original HD and the OWC SSD as separate, native drives.

I then ran diglloyd Tools' "Test Reliability" check on the native SSD and found that it experienced the same disk i/o errors as the Fusion Drive had been experiencing. The same test on the HD ran without problems.

I'll try the same drive on the main controller or externally via Firewire to try to isolate the issue to the drive or the controller, and then have a chat with OWC Tech Support to see what they recommend. I have a smaller OWC SSD drive that I can try on the same controller too.

I'll update this thread with the outcome, either way.

Well Said. Bravo. Been dealing with these types for over a year now, since I joined these forums.

JohnDCCIU wrote:

etresoft wrote:

If Apple's Storage Engineering Team thought it would be a good idea to support a Fusion Drive on a 2 year-old machine with 3rd party components, then they would have given you some way to do that.

And speaking of hijacking threads, this is a user-to-user tech support forum. Unless you have a definitive answer for danibjor, then you are the one hijacking this thread.

OMG, there's another troll in this thread? Geez.

Apple did provide such a way: it's called the diskutil command-line utility with the corestorage verb. It's perfectly legitimate part of the 10.8.2 system and no "hack" is required to use it to create a Fusion Drive on an older system, something which many people are doing successfully. Please go away unless you have something useful to contribute, other than just joining Kappy in useless naysaying.

While I don't have a definitive answer for danibjor, I'm contributing my experience with a similar machine in creating a Fusion Drive, as he asked about. That's on-topic and not thread hijacking.