Apple's New Fusion Drive Works on Older Macs
One of the interesting additions to Apple's iMac and Mac mini lines announced last week is Fusion Drive, a hybrid storage system that combines a 128 GB solid-state drive (SSD) with a 1 TB or 3 TB traditional hard drive into a single volume to offer the best of both worlds in terms of performance and storage space. Apple's software automatically manages the combined volume, placing the core system and other frequently used applications and files on the solid-state drive for faster access while keeping lower-priority applications and data on the traditional hard drive.
Mac developer Patrick Stein has been toying with his own Mac Pro setup and has managed to build his own Fusion Drive using command line tools. Stein configured an internal solid-state drive and a USB-attached traditional hard drive on his system and was able to combine them into a single logical volume as used for Fusion Drive.
Attached are a 120GB SSD (disk1) and a 750GB HDD (disk7) to my Mac. I attached the SSD via SATA to be sure that the system could figure out that it’s a SSD via SMART. The HDD is attached via USB. USB I chose to clearly see a difference in speed.
Stein then proceeded to test the setup, writing data first to the SSD and then to the traditional hard drive once the SSD had filled up. By preferentially accessing data that had initially been written to the traditional hard drive, Stein was able to watch as the data was automatically transferred to the SSD for faster access. Upon stopping the process, the system automatically pushed the data back to the traditional hard drive, and in one final step Stein began accessing the data once more and after about an hour was able to see it pulled back onto the SSD.
In several follow-up Tumblr posts, Stein details further explorations into how Fusion Drive works, noting that he was able to use not only the default HFS+ file system for OS X with it, but also ZFS. All of Stein's work was performed with a standard installation of OS X 10.8.2.
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Top Rated Comments
Respectfully disagree. The article explains that the file swapping is working in "fusion" mode, which is really what makes it a fusion drive in the first place.
Regardless, my guess is Apple blocks this option in an update.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what a Fusion drive is... The Fusion drive is software based, it is not hardware. A hybrid drive IS hardware, and is NOT what Apple's marketing department has called a Fusion Drive. The Fusion drive is a SSD & a HDD in an iMac, and at the OS level, it is picking and choosing where to store programs / data. So the title of this article is correct, if you also own a Mac, and own a SSD & HDD attached to that Mac, you can also have a "Fusion" drive (assuming Apple doesn't shut down these command line hacks). This isn't misleading at all. Will it perform the same as the Mac version? That depends on what SSD / HDD Apple is using versus what SSD / HDD YOU are using.
I have a Mid 2011 Mac Mini, with a SSD / HDD installed, and I cannot wait to try this out, I currently have my home directory on the HDD to save room, but with this setup, the OS can choose where to put everything, which is truly ideal.
P.S. There's Windows software out there that will combine various drives into a single "hybrid" volume. Does that mean that's "fusion" drive software? I think not.
So the headline is false. It's not Apple's Fusion Drive at all.
It should read more like "Computer Geek manages to emulate Apple's Fusion Drive in his own setup"
this thread is one infinite loop.