[Macworld]

Post your comments for How to make your own Fusion Drive here

[jimlat]

I currently have my 2008 unibody Macbook set up with a 256GB Crucial M4 in the optical bay with Mountain Lion, and a 1TB Scorpio in the original HDD location for apps/data/etc...backing both up to Time Machine....if I do this and restore from Time Machine, will it work? Also, if I ever decide to go back to 2 separate drives, is it hard to sever the CoreStorage link between the two drives?

[FurriousG]

Has anyone made a fusion drive from an SSD, an HD, and one of those two-drive thunderbolt cases (e.g., G-Tech, Western Digital, etc.)?

[lkrndu]

"The only thing to remember is that they both need to be connected at the same time to work."

Not quite the only.

Bear in min that when (and not if) either drive ges flooey it's 'Arrivederci' to ALL that they had until that moment contained.

[TryPodTech]

We made a YouTube video a couple weeks back detailing this process, as well as providing some speed tests and benchmarks. Check it out :

[tjcronan]

Quote

"The only thing to remember is that they both need to be connected at the same time to work." Not quite the only. Bear in min that when (and not if) either drive ges flooey it's 'Arrivederci' to ALL that they had until that moment contained.

That's true for any drive that isn't part of something like raid 5 or a Drobo, etc.

[TryPodTech]

Quote

I currently have my 2008 unibody Macbook set up with a 256GB Crucial M4 in the optical bay with Mountain Lion, and a 1TB Scorpio in the original HDD location for apps/data/etc...backing both up to Time Machine....if I do this and restore from Time Machine, will it work? Also, if I ever decide to go back to 2 separate drives, is it hard to sever the CoreStorage link between the two drives?

I tried restoring from a backup to our homebrew Fusion Drive, and although it worked, during startup some funky stuff happens every time. After that the system works normally though.

There's directions on our YouTube video page on how to delete the Core Storage volume and go back to 2 independent drives.

[machacks]

check out his comments on fusion

http://macperformanc...g-a-mirror.html

http://macperformanc...on-MacMini.html

[icerabbit]

Great technical article.

Personally, my vote is for a non-fusion setup.

Keep the two drives working independently. Have an SSD as a primary drive. Partition the hard drive (or second SSD) where one partition becomes bulk storage and the other becomes your backup of your primary drive.

That way you at least have some redundancy.

[JamesLemoineII3yh5]

Great article, thank you for the write-up. From the examples above, it seems the newly created drive only uses 1TB of space and not the combined space of the two drives. Am I understanding that correctly? If so, that would result in a 19% loss of disk space than if the drives were to be used independently.

The plugs to machack's articles indicate there is not an indication of smart use of the SSD storage for commonly used files... Has anyone from MacWorld been able to verify the OS will move commonly used files to SSD for faster read access?

[greglawhorn]

Quote

I currently have my 2008 unibody Macbook set up with a 256GB Crucial M4 in the optical bay with Mountain Lion, and a 1TB Scorpio in the original HDD location for apps/data/etc...backing both up to Time Machine....if I do this and restore from Time Machine, will it work? Also, if I ever decide to go back to 2 separate drives, is it hard to sever the CoreStorage link between the two drives?

My setup is about the same as yours (my SSD is in the main position, and a 750GB in the optical space). I booted from an external drive running Mountain Lion 10.2, and set up the logical volume as described above. Restoring from Time Machine was fairly straightforward. I did that during the initial setup after installing Mountain Lion, and once it was complete I had my desktop back, etc.

I also "un-fusioned" the drives. The first command-line entry (diskutil coreStorage create myLogicalVolGroup /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2) can be performed on individual drives, using just disk1 or disk2. Give them separate names, of course. I also had to run a command-line format before Disk Utility would see the volume, but I did not use "/dev/" in the disk assignment, so perhaps that was my problem.

[gettingbored]

Quote

I currently have my 2008 unibody Macbook set up with a 256GB Crucial M4 in the optical bay with Mountain Lion, and a 1TB Scorpio in the original HDD location for apps/data/etc...backing both up to Time Machine....if I do this and restore from Time Machine, will it work? Also, if I ever decide to go back to 2 separate drives, is it hard to sever the CoreStorage link between the two drives?

You want to take two drives, which are backed up both individually to a Time Machine, then make a Fusion Drive with the two drives and restore both Time Machine backups to the same Fusion Drive?

[Brentyork]

Thanks for the article. I have a 2011 imac and just ordered the exact same SSD. Not sure how I'm going to set mine up. I could run everything but itunes media off the SSD, so I might just keep them separated, with the itunes media on the HDD.
Nice to have the options and look forward to hear what other folks are doing.

[Tigerswim]

Do the jumper pins have any particular configuration before installation? Should SSD be jumpered to master and HD to slave?