Thursday, November 15, 2012

How to make your own Fusion Drive

How to make your own Fusion Drive:


A Fusion Drive gives you the best of two worlds: the high storage capacity of a traditional platter-based hard drive, and the speed boost of a solid-state drive, without you having to manually manage files. Apple offers the Fusion Drive as build-to-order options for the $799 Mac mini and the upcoming iMac, but if you are willing, able, and have the parts, you can make your own Fusion Drive.

To build a Fusion Drive, you need to use the Terminal. We're going to lay out the commands you need in a way that most can understand, and you don't need to enter a lot of them. However, a warning to anyone who has never used the Terminal: Working with the Terminal isn't as simple as a graphic interface, as spelling counts and you don't always have a nice list of commands. You also need to be using OS X 10.8.2 or later.


Gather your drives


1TB Apple HDD and 250GB OWC Mercury Extreme SSDAlbert Filice1TB Hitachi hard drive (from a Mac mini) and 250GB OWC Mercury Extreme SSD.
You need two drives to make a Fusion Drive, and if you want to get the speed boost, one should be an SSD. In our setup, we used a Hitachi 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive (the one that ships in a Mac mini) and a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD.

Apple chooses the drives they use based on extensive testing, which is why they recommend buying a Fusion Drive at the point of purchasing your Mac. Apple does not support users who have built their own Fusion Drive. (In our lab experiments, I was able to create a Fusion Drive with two flash thumb drives.)

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DIGITAL JUICE

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