Hard Disk Drive Replacement Options

I think you should look at the 240-ish sized SSD drives. They tend to have more chips inside that can be accessed at the same time, boosting performance. And the size is more like a "regular" drive.

SATA Bus speed is a load of specs-manship. Rotating Drives in this class can't produce data fast enough to get clipped:

A typical Rotating drive can produce a single burst of data off the platters at about 125 MB/sec.

Some SSD drives can do sustained reads of about 500 MB/sec. (Some Samsung go higher, but at a price)

SATA at 3 Mbits/sec is 375 Mbytes/sec

SATA at 6 Mbits/sec is 750 Mbytes/sec

The other thing to consider is that an SSD drive uses less power, and generates less noise and heat.

It sounds to me like you've already committed to a two drive system with an SSD and an HDD. Maybe you already bought the stuff.

In any case, keep in mind that with a Fusion drive, backups are particularly important. There's no easy way to tell which file or portion of file is on a given disk at a given time, so backups are absolutely critical. In this sense, it's almost like a striped RAID set.

MrM201,

I just got through rebuilding a similar MB Pro with a HDD and replaced the cable. I shopped on line and found them for $40, but I settled for a used one from Amazon for $20 and it works perfectly. How's that fit your budget? It's easy to replace if you watch several YouTube videos. Remember to put tape on the inside of the case where the cable runs to prevent future abrasion and failure.

Good look.

R

Another thought,

I doubt you are going to stay with this computer for very long as old as it is. It is relatively slow and the processor is outdated. So why don't you save your money and go with a good used or inexpensive HDD and start saving up for a new one?

Yes, think that's right. If your computer isn't fusion drive equipped you can do it in 10.8.X:

http://blog.macsales.com/?s=fusion+drives

Splitting data

http://blog.macsales.com/24915-splitting-your-data-an-alternative-to-fusion

MrWilliams201 wrote:

Update:

I bought the SanDisk SSD and the Hitachi HDD. Right now I've got them configured with Snow Leopard using 250GB on the HDD, and Mavericks on the SSD. I intend to create a large data partition, probably, remarkably, named "Data" on the HDD and put all the big stuff, like photo, music, and video libraries on that.

Now, if I want to convert the SSD/HDD combo to a Fusion drive, is there a way to do this in place with everything installed, or do I need to make the Fusion drive from scratch and re-install the Mavericks partition. I'm under the impression that if I made one big Fusion drive with 2 partitions, I wouldn't be able to put Snow Leopard on the other Fusion partition because Snow Leopard apparently doesn't even know what a Fusion drive is. Is that right?

You can encrypt a single volume which causes that to be turned into a Core Storage partition but to create a Fusion requires the drives/volumes you want to use to be reformatted. From the SpudNutty link, see the following article:

http://blog.macsales.com/15617-creating-your-own-fusion-drive

I believe, however, that you can split the partition on the HDD, convert one unused section of that to Core Storage, then add that to the SSD. You may even be able to do likewise with the SSD, but why would you do that?

The splitting data article that spudnuty linked might be a better idea because you could do that with both OS versions, if interested.

More questions about Fusion setups. If one part of a Fusion goes down can the data on the other drive be accessed and saved. I get the impression it can't and it has to be treated like a striped RAID unit. Also, can a Fusion have more than just one hard drive. For example, could it be set up with one SSD and two hard drives? I'm not thinking about doing that at this time but I'm just curious if a Fusion can be expanded dynamically. About 10 years ago I worked on a Unix system (I think it was an IBM AIX) and if I recall correctly drives could be added to it and made part of a larger volume (don't quote me on that, I'm doing it from memory and it was a long time ago.)

No, the managing software decides what's on what drive at what time, and in some cases at a given instance, part of a file might be on the SSD and the other part on the HDD.

I'd like to offer an opinion, meaning the comment isn't right or wrong, it's just an opinion. If it were my system and I had multiple OSes on it, with one (Snow Leopard) being completely oblivious to what a Fusion drive is, I would just use regular formatted drives and skip the Fusion all together. If you ever wanted to transfer something from the Mavericks partition on the Fusion to the Snow Leopard partition while running under Snow Leopard, you won't be able to do it. Snow Leopard won't be able to read anything off of it. If you had a Snow Leopard, Mavericks, and Data partition, each could be backed up independently, nearly everything is accessible, and if one drive would fail (SSDs do fail, by the way) it would make restoring and/or transferring stuff just that much easier.

Like I said, it's just an opinion. If you just want to create a Fusion for the fun of it, then by all means, have at it.

If you're keeping good backups you can do whatever you want. Many people don't keep backups at all, and even more couldn't even figure out how to configure a Fusion drive, so congratulations.

You may find, however, that with a Fusion, during drive intensive tasks the system may act more like an old hard drive than an SSD. It will depend on how full your logical volume gets.

No it's not your imagination. If your system has 4GB or less RAM then the overhead for a Fusion drive might be noticeable.