Replacement drive with WD Black2

Something to consider to anyone doing this, ESPECIALLY with Yosemite, read this article about enabling TRIM, as well as kext signing:

http://www.larryjordan.biz/caution-ssd-drives-and-yosemite/

Also of note:

http://www.cindori.org/software/trimenabler/

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79684/selecting-a-ssd-for-fusion-drive/ 79703#79703

wd black 2 is a great idea as a replacement drive in a macbook. Im considering it for my HACKINTOSH .. Take this a step further and enable FUSION drive.

there are quite a few guides on setting up a fusion drive. Intact the fusion drive method might negate having to "unlock" the HDD part on a windows pc.

There should be some command line disk format options that will negate having to unlock in windows as well. but thats just a theory.

Hi Baejor,

How did you zero the disk?

I tried zeroing the data with WINDLG. unfortunately, diskutil still read it as 1.12T SSD.

I chose fast zeroing, but i don't think full zeroing will be different.

I put two WD Black 2's in my 2011 mac mini server assuming the 5yr warranty, 2.25Tb total storage and Fusion w/SSD on boot drive was worth it compared to a 256 SSD + 2Tb 5400 RPM drive. It may be a wash. We will see. But I do want to highlight that using the MAC instructions in this case did not work without some Terminal work.

The update the device firmware worked for both drives. The Preparing your WD Black2 Drive instructions on p10 only prepared one drive initially. This caused an error to occur when trying the "Create a Mac Fusion Drive " from page 12. So, in terminal I typed in "diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk3" where I verified in advance that disk3 was the WD Black drive on which the initialization worked ("ls /dev/disk*" combined with "diskutil cs list") . Then I reran the "Preparing your WD Black2 Drive instructions on p10" and it initialized the second WB Black. I had to use the same trick to make the "Create a Mac Fusion Drive " from page 12 work. The drives show up in "about this mac" as fusion drives according to the "

Verify Creation of a Fusion Drive or Dual Drive (Non-Fusion) " section in the instructions. But the fact that only one of the two WB Blacks is under Core Storage suggests that one is acting a Fusion drive and the other is just looking like a giant merged Volume with no distinction or optimization between what is on the SSD and what is on its HDD.

I likely needed to merge both WD Blacks into a single Fusion drive using ( http://www.macissues.com/2014/04/10/how-to-make-a-custom-fusion-drive-in-os-x/ )

I hope this helps someone. Also, if anyone knows of an easy way to tell if the second WB Black is going to act as Fusion vs a dumb merged SSD+HDD, please let me know. Thx

I found the answer to my own question. By looking at the drives in disk utility it was clear that only one was a Fusion drive. The other was an unintelligent merged SSD+HDD. So I used the same terminal trick to get to one homogeneous Fusion drive spanning both Black2 drives.

I booted from the old hard drive using "option" on boot (note: one other advantage of the Black drives is that each comes with a USB to SATA cable).

I used "diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk3" to unmount one of the two Blacks. Then I ran the "Create Dual Drive Volumes utility" program from WD. That converted one to a drive with separated SSD and HDD. Then I booted again from the usb, unmounted new "Dual Drive" and ran the utility on the remaining WD Black. I then followed the instructions in the link from my last post to merge both WD Blacks into a Fusion being sure to list the SSD disks as the first two in the "diskutil cs create GROUPNAME disk1 disk2s2" command followed by the disk names for the HDD. I then rebooted following the instructions in "Restoring the Master Drive Image" and it all works. BTW, I purchased the WD Blacks at Fry's for $129 each resulting in $258 for 2.2Tb with 256Gb of it as SSD which is quite competitive given that they provide the USB cables making it so your old drives are not just desk weights.

For anyone that has this drive as Fusion, what speeds are you getting?

I'm only getting about 143Mbps on my Mid-2010 iMac, which seems too low although it is around 120% faster than my old HDD which caps at 65Mbps.

To answer my own question, I found this: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2070804/review-wds-black2-combo-ssd/western-digit al-black2-dual-drive-review-not-the-killer-storage-upgrade.html

143Mbps sounds about right for this drive. Very disappointing! Wish I found the page above prior to purchase. The price is a quarter of Samsung 840 and unfortunately the speed is also a quarter that of Samsung's.

Just and FYI to anyone who finds this thread, Western Digital has released official firmware update and had updated their installation guides to directly support this as a fusion drive under OS X.

Installation guide: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/2779-800001.pdf

Firmware Update, and configuration utilities:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=2301&sid=236&lang=en

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=2301&sid=237&lang=en

it doesn't mention if trim is enabled on the new firmware.

I haven't tried it yet. I'll let you know how it goes. 🙂

More info, for anyone finding this thread in the future.

I've just installed the Black2 drive into a Mac Mini along with another full SSD drive. The full SSD is my boot drive, with the Black2 being used for additional data. WD's software is a pain to work with, I had to put the Black2 into another computer first in order to update the firmware (does not enable TRIM BTW), since the firmware can only be installed when the drive is connected via SATA, using a USB enclosure does not work for updating the firmware.

The other pain is that the two utilities WD provides to switch the drive between dual drive mode (separate 120G and 1T drives), and a combined fusion drive, will only work if the Black2 drive is the on the disk0 SATA channel. However, you can tweak the utilities to work with your drive on a different channel (mine was disk1). To do so, right click on either app 'Create Core Storage Volume.app' or 'Create Dual Drive Volumes.app' and hit 'Show Package Contents'. Then go into the 'Contents' folder and you'll see a file called 'document.wflow'. Edit that file and replace all instances of 'disk1' to whatever you need it to be (run 'diskutil list' in Terminal to see the list of drives). Now you can run the app you modified to change the configuration of the drive.

Thanks for the update!