[Macworld]

Post your comments for How to split up a Fusion Drive here

[quakerotis]

I recently created a fusion drive on my iMac with the internal drive and a FW800 drive. It worked fine for a couple of days and then it just borked the whole system causing kernel panics.

So I undid them and now things are back to normal. Oh well, there are worse ways to spend a cold Saturday afternoon.

[medhatashamalla]

I created a fusion drive for my Mac Pro (early 2008) using an intel SSD (240 GB) and a Seagate HD (1TB), reinstalled ML 10.8.2 and had nothing but a very fast, stable computer. It worked great for me. Creating the drives took minutes and installation + data restoration took but couple of hours. Best upgrade for my machine so far.

[KernelG]

Can you custom partition one? Say I get a 3 TB Fusion Drive and want to set aside 1 TB at the end of the HD mechanism for slow storage like iTunes files. Or maybe I'd want to reserve 1 TB at the top for speedy/large audio recording. Is the drive presented as two pieces or one in Disk Utility? Does the Fusion functionality automatically apply to the first partition, or... what happens exactly?

[mcgordon]

Quote

Can you custom partition one? Say I get a 3 TB Fusion Drive and want to set aside 1 TB at the end of the HD mechanism for slow storage like iTunes files. Or maybe I'd want to reserve 1 TB at the top for speedy/large audio recording. Is the drive presented as two pieces or one in Disk Utility? Does the Fusion functionality automatically apply to the first partition, or... what happens exactly?

You can add one partition with boot camp assistant or disk utility. It's apportioned from the HDD in an SSD/HDD combination and you cannot choose which device or where on the device you want the new partition, though it should typically appear at the end of the HDD.

[monstasaurous]

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Can you custom partition one? Say I get a 3 TB Fusion Drive and want to set aside 1 TB at the end of the HD mechanism for slow storage like iTunes files. Or maybe I'd want to reserve 1 TB at the top for speedy/large audio recording. Is the drive presented as two pieces or one in Disk Utility? Does the Fusion functionality automatically apply to the first partition, or... what happens exactly?

If you want to partition a portion of the larger drive away from the Fusion drive, you can do so by partitioning the drive before you create the fusion drive.

Then, when creating the Fusion Drive, rather than using the mount point to choose the partitioned drive (/dev/disk#) choose the volume identifier, which look like this:
disk1s1
or maybe:
disk2s4

You can see these when you type "diskutil list" into the terminal. So you can combine an entire disk such as your SSD with a partition on your HDD if you want to manage a portion of it separately.

[orbajack]

I have setup a Fusion drive on my 2007 iMac with 1TB hdd & a 128GB ssd in the dvd bay, it works very well. But I'm not 'allowed' to create a Recovery Drive on the Fusion drive.

[monstasaurous]

orbajack, on 30 November 2012 - 02:36 AM, said:

I have setup a Fusion drive on my 2007 iMac with 1TB hdd & a 128GB ssd in the dvd bay, it works very well. But I'm not 'allowed' to create a Recovery Drive on the Fusion drive.

How are you trying to create the recovery partition?

[NBCGLX]

This is all well and good, but what about those of us with Apple's bluetooth keyboard...startup keyboard commands don't work!

[monstasaurous]

Quote

This is all well and good, but what about those of us with Apple's bluetooth keyboard...startup keyboard commands don't work!

Have you seen this: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3273

[edmechem]

Quote

I have setup a Fusion drive on my 2007 iMac with 1TB hdd & a 128GB ssd in the dvd bay, it works very well. But I'm not 'allowed' to create a Recovery Drive on the Fusion drive.

This is expected behavior. If you have another type of Core Storage volume, say, a FileVault encrypted volume (whole disk encrypted, Lion or Mountain Lion) - you can't create a Recovery Drive partition on it either -- it can't be resized, which is necessarily a part of the process.

I ran across this when attempting to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my boot drive's Recovery Drive partition, to a new external drive intended to be a clone of my boot drive, which I'd already formatted as Encrypted. The solution was to use Disk Utility to erase the drive, reformatting it as a single regular JHFS+ (non-encrypted) volume, then use CCC to clone the Recovery Drive partition onto it (in the process, shrinking the non-encrypted Finder-visible volume), and then finally after doing that, erasing it again, choosing Extended (Journaled, Encrypted).

Lesson being, it seems that Core Storage volumes - whether Journaled & Encrypted, or in your case, Fusion - can't be resized in place -- the way traditional non- Core Storage volumes can be.

[krux77]

Quote

I created a fusion drive for my Mac Pro (early 2008) using an intel SSD (240 GB) and a Seagate HD (1TB), reinstalled ML 10.8.2 and had nothing but a very fast, stable computer. It worked great for me. Creating the drives took minutes and installation + data restoration took but couple of hours. Best upgrade for my machine so far.

had u used the mac pro with the ssd as boot drive before setting up the fusion drive??? didn't that go just as fast?

[jorgefilemon]

-would this void my warranty?

- Could i be able to upgrade the 128 SSD to a 256 eventuall?

they went from a 256SSD to a 128, this makes me really angry!

[monstasaurous]

jorgefilemon, on 22 December 2012 - 10:38 AM, said:

-would this void my warranty?

- Could i be able to upgrade the 128 SSD to a 256 eventuall?

they went from a 256SSD to a 128, this makes me really angry!

I'm pretty sure you're allowed to replace your hard drive yourself, it I haven't looked into it so don't take my word on it. I would recommend asking apple if its ok to replace your hard drive while under warranty.

You can upgrade to a larger SSD which could give you the ability to move huge amounts of files very fast, but I think the increase in performance with a larger SSD in a fusion drive is negligible after a certain point. However upgrading will mean having to wipe the data from both drives, recreating the CoreStorage volume and then moving your data back.