[Macworld]

Post your comments for Fusion Drive: An overview here

[Jaycer]

So this can be built and configured by a user? The necessary resources are available in OS X 10.8?

[ajaffe]

I've got a two-year-old iMac with a 256GB SSD and 1TB spinning disk (an Apple-supplied configuration). This is my main machine, so I'm not going to "roll my own" fusion drive with CoreStorage. Do we have any evidence or information on whether Apple is going to *officially* back port fusion-drive capability to these older machines?

[pitagora]

why apple is not offering the fusion drive option to the mac mini server?

[JMHammer]

Small correction: The article states, "(currently, a Fusion Drive is a $300 uprade to the $799 Mac mini)" however the 1tb Fusion Drive upgrade is $250. The upgrade to a 256gb SSD is $300.

[greglawhorn]

I replaced the optical drive in my MacBook Pro with a 750g hard drive, and added an SSD about a year ago. Yesterday I followed the instructions at http://jollyjinx.tum...since-apple-has to create a Fusion drive.

1) It deletes everything on both drives - backup everything!
2) I installed Mountain Lion to an external drive and managed everything from there.
3) it requires using Terminal. I don't really use Terminal, but I copied and pasted from the instructions and changed commands to suit my setup.

[JMHammer]

Question: Where does the system put virtual memory? Is a certain amount of SSD space on the Fusion Drive reserved for that purpose? I imagine that using the SSD for virtual memory would improve performance tremendously but might require another 2gb-16gb reserved to work properly.

[scb]

I created a fusion drive according to jollyjinx's directions, and it appears to be working well. However, my Storage pane in About This Mac does not indicate 'Hard Drive + Flash Storage'. Do I have a configuration problem?

[Medboy]

Question: I have an iMac with two attached 1TB disks. One is my iPhoto library and the other is my Time Machine backup. The disk on the iMac is partitioned to include a Windows XP (using Parallels) environment. I'm considering buying a new iMac with the Fusion drive option. Will it be possible to have the new iMac with Fusion drive contain the contents of my current iMac and the iPhoto drives, including the Windows partition?

[fitz]

I spent hours yesterday trying to set up a Fusion drive on my MacPro. I have a 240GB SSD in bay 1 and put a 2TB drive in bay 2. Reformatted both and then followed the directions from jollyjinx. With the drives both in the MacPro, I could never get past the diskutil cs create diskx diskx command. It would always gave me an error saying it could not write the last block to the 2TB drive. I placed the 2TB drive in an external enclosure and gave it another try and it appeared to create the Fusion drive, but when I moved the 2TB back into the MacPro and rebooted, it didn't work. Went back to my set up with the OS on the SSD and my Users folder on the 2TB.

[DCJ001]

What happens if I back up a Fusion drive with Time Machine, And then choose to restore it to a new fusion drive or simply one hard drive?

[glaire4206]

Would like to see some write tests when the fusion drive gets close to capacity. Is there a percentage of used capacity that we should stay under to maintain the write performance?

[jowie]

Your last comment about RAID 0 and redundancy answered my question, but I'm not sure it's such a great technology as a result. By relying on two drives for a single volume, you are effectively doubling the failure rate.

I'd much rather a Fusion Drive which created a copy of the most-used files on the SSD, rather than moving them. Okay, so you'd have 128 GB less space, but there would be redundancy, the HD could be cloned to a same-capacity drive using SuperDuper, and you could even remove and replace the SSD without any loss of data.

I'm not wishing for people to lose their data, but I hope there are enough cases of this to push Apple into giving us a Fusion Drive option like the one I described.

[technologist]

Quote

Your last comment about RAID 0 and redundancy answered my question, but I'm not sure it's such a great technology as a result. By relying on two drives for a single volume, you are effectively doubling the failure rate.

That's a valid point, so the take-home message is: get your backup (Time Machine, or whatever) house in order before you use a Fusion Drive Mac.

Which, really should be no different from what you should be doing anyway. It's just playing Russian Roulette with two rounds in the cylinder.