[tony11]

1. will Carbon Copy Cloner work with fusion drive. Will external (CCC clone) drive start up mac and restore ALL to fusion drive?

2. does fusion drive actually use a UNIQUELY DIFFERENT version of Max OS X DISK UTILITY than the ordinary disk utility that comes with 10.8.2 ?

.... When I purchase a new IMac I want to boot and clone new IMac from existing CCC clone external hard drive and thus INSTALL all my data and existing programs I have on existing IMac.
thanks

[inodes]

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Seems like it's still an open question why the fusion drive approach is preferable to a hybrid drive.

If you actually used a hybrid drive, you wouldn't question the approach.
"Hybrid" drives only use 4GB of cache, with the read/write device still being the HDD. Effectively you can only ever achieve a little better than HDD speeds (write has to be committed to HDD).

The Fusion drive approach tackles the issue two ways. Firstly, the SSD isn't used as a cache (it's actually there for read/write and writes DO NOT necessarily need to committed to HDD saving a lot of time), secondly the SSD is significantly larger then a hybrid's cache (4GB vs 128GB).

Testing shows that writes of 4GB or less will always be as SSD speeds. Writes greater than that will be a SSD speeds if there is less than (128GB - (size of write)GB) of space in use.

Commonly read files will also be at SSD speeds (roughly 4 reads over short period of time will shift file over to SSD if it's stored on HDD).

So you get the positive of a hybrid drive or standard HDD (space)
in addition to SSD speeds in many cases.

[GiuseppeTaibi]

Is it possible to get a Fusion Drive out of a MacMini 2012 and put it into a 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mid-2010 ?

[audiophotoguy]

Can anyone explain to me how exactly the fusion drive software component is managed? With what I just learned about the hardware component I see two options here for my goal:

1. Get the "fusion" drive from the factory, get rid of the fusion management settings/software and replace the SSD and the 1TB drive over time with better parts (larger SSD, faster magentic drive). The benefit would be that the connectors, screws, brackets etc are already in place and swapping the drives shouldn't be too hard. The downside could be that it may be difficult to keep the "fusion" management software off the computer. Not sure how that works as I'm new to OS X. I'm also looking to run Parallels or a separate XP partition to have access to standard MS Office occasionally.

2. Get the regular Mac Mini and the OWC kit for a 240 or 480GB SSD and the largest 7200rpm magnetic drive that will work.

Cost seems to end up being about the same, right? Hardware installation is probably a bit easier in option 1 while there are potential issues with dealing with the fusion drive software that I do NOT want. I don't want to get into an argument as to why I don't want it and how silly that is since Apple knows best where to put my data. I want the traditional physical split between the OS and programs on one drive (the fast SSD) and my data (audio and photos) on another (7200rpm magnetic drive that can be easily backed up).

[pappahorvath]

In the article about MAKING a fusion drive; it is suggested that you need to have MountainLion (10.8.x) in order to do it. but it is not clear if you need 10.8 for making it or for using the fusion drive you made.
I have a MacBook (2008; 2.4Gh IntelCoreDuo, 4G ram) running Lion. I also have a spare 126 SSD & a 256 GB 5000RPM drive. According to Apple I am not 10.8 "eligible." My goal is to speed up my Mac (OS 10.8.x would be ok but by no means necessary). Is there any way around this problem?

[iJStrand]

No. Because as much as it is a hardware swap, there is OS software that requires for it to know what to move. It wouldn't work correctly.

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Is it possible to get a Fusion Drive out of a MacMini 2012 and put it into a 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mid-2010 ?

[RobbyC]

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Will 27" iMacs have SSDs combined with 7200-rpm HDDs while 21.5" iMacs have 5400-rpm HDDs in their Fusion drives?

[RobbyC]

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Will 27" iMacs have SSDs combined with 7200-rpm HDDs while 21.5" iMacs have 5400-rpm HDDs in their Fusion drives?

Yes. Thanks for your help geniuses. Now macworld if you don't get this popup ad off your site i won't be back to look at the rest of your ads.

[JiminyChristmas]

Hal,

Unless a HDD is zapped by electricity, it usually gives an indication that it is failing, such as clicks, variable whirring, and bad sectors. Of course, any critical or non-replaceable data should be stored on a mirrored array anyway.

[tamengua]

Is it possible to tell your SS drive to leave a larger space open before it transporting stuff to the HD?