With Apple now supplying Fusion Drives in their current generation Mac Minis & iMacs we thought it was about time we let classic Mac Pro users know how to get in on the action. A Fusion Drive is basically a software based SSHD (hybrid drive), it uses software to combine a regular, slower but higher capacity, HDD and a modern, faster but smaller capacity, SSD or flash storage module into one drive. OS X will then control which drive your files end up being stored on, all files will be stored on the SSD until it’s full, after this point your system will store only your most used files on the SSD.
In theory, this set up should manually optimise the way your files are stored, meaning the best possible storage performance without lifting a finger. Now, one may ask, surely a hardware based SSHD is superior to the software based Fusion Drive? Well, the general consensus is that Apple’s proprietary Fusion Drive software is in fact a superior file management system to those used in SSHDs.
With all this in mind, lets talk about how a Fusion Drive can help system performance. Any file stored on an SSD will see performance benefits over those stored on a HDD, quicker loading to RAM/CPU, faster application load speeds, faster OS X boot times, the list could go on. Basically, if something is important to your workflow, be that your OS, favourite applications, often used plugins or sample libraries, then they are best off stored on an SSD. Of course, this requires manual organisation, Fusion Drives attempt to alleviate this by analysing exactly what it is you use most often and then storing that on the SSD for you. The crux of the argument for a Fusion Drive? Pain free optimal storage performance.
So, what do you need to create a Fusion Drive?:
In theory, this set up should manually optimise the way your files are stored, meaning the best possible storage performance without lifting a finger. Now, one may ask, surely a hardware based SSHD is superior to the software based Fusion Drive? Well, the general consensus is that Apple’s proprietary Fusion Drive software is in fact a superior file management system to those used in SSHDs.
With all this in mind, lets talk about how a Fusion Drive can help system performance. Any file stored on an SSD will see performance benefits over those stored on a HDD, quicker loading to RAM/CPU, faster application load speeds, faster OS X boot times, the list could go on. Basically, if something is important to your workflow, be that your OS, favourite applications, often used plugins or sample libraries, then they are best off stored on an SSD. Of course, this requires manual organisation, Fusion Drives attempt to alleviate this by analysing exactly what it is you use most often and then storing that on the SSD for you. The crux of the argument for a Fusion Drive? Pain free optimal storage performance.
So, what do you need to create a Fusion Drive?:
Fusion drive is not that reliable for two internal drives so using it for internal + external configuration is a bad idea. You can simply reassign the User Home Folder to the external drive and call it a day. Go to System Preferences: Click to select Users & Groups. 1TB 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. When you purchase a Mac with an optional Fusion Drive (currently, a Fusion Drive is a $250 upgrade to the $799 Mac mini), the OS and all of the applications that ship with a new Mac are loaded onto. Fusion drive on OSX with two SSD drives advanced, fusion, Hard Drive, Mojave Add comments The new Mac Minis have super fast SSD Drives. I measured read times of 2500MB/s which is 5 times faster than the SSD drive in my old mac mini.
Fusion Drive 2014 Mac Mini. If your Mac Mini 2014 shipped from Apple with a fusion drive, then your Mac Mini has both the SATA and the PCIe connector. You can replace the SATA drive with a 2.5 inch SSD and you can replace the original Apple SSD with a faster Aura Pro X2 NVMe SSD.
- 1 or more HDDs.
- 1 or more SSDs or flash storage modules.
- The instructions below.
How to create a Fusion Drive in OS X:
Ok, lets get into this proper. Here’s the step by step guide to create your Fusion Drive. Of course you will need a HDD & SSD installed in your system before starting the process.
- Make sure that both your SSD & HDD are installed in your Mac Pro using the SATA or PCI-e bays.
- This process will destroy any data currently stored on your SSD & HDD, so please ensure they are backed up properly if there is data on them that you do not wish to lose.
- Boot into OS X (if you would like to use your new fusion drive as the boot drive then you will need to boot using an OS X USB Recovery Partition, if you need to create one follow this guide).
- Once you are booted into either OS X or your OS X USB, open Terminal. You can find it at the following path: ApplicationsUtilitiesTerminal.app.
- Inside terminal enter the following command: diskutil list
- All of the drives in your system will now be listed, each will reveal in mount point in the following format: /dev/disk#
- The ‘#’ will be a number which is assigned to each drive by OS X. Make a note of the mount points for both the HDD & SSD that you wish to create the Fusion Drive with, you’ll need them shortly.
- We will now create the logical volume group using Core Storage, this will perform as a container for the drives that are being fused. You will need the mount points that you noted down in the previous step. Enter the following command into terminal: diskutil coreStorage create LOGICAL_VOL_GROUP_NAME DRIVE_1 DRIVE_2
- In place of ‘LOGICAL_VOL_GROUP_NAME’ select a name for your new Fusion Drive.
- In place of ‘DRIVE_1’ & ‘DRIVE_2’ use the mount points we jotted down before in the ‘/dev/disk#’ format.
- So if you decide to call your Fusion Drive ‘Fusion Drive’ & your disk mount points are ‘/dev/disk1’ & ‘/dev/disk2’ then the command would look like this: diskutil coreStorage create ‘Fusion Drive’ /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2
- Make sure you include the apostrophes around the name, otherwise the command wont work
- We will now create the logical volume, this is where your data will be stored. To complete this step we will require your LVG UUID, this is an identifier assigned to storage groups by OS X. After completing the previous step, Terminal should now display your LVG UUID as ‘Core Storage LVG UUID’. Make a note of the ID and enter the following command: diskutil coreStorage createVolume lvgUUID type name size
- ‘type’ refers to the format of the drive, for OS X Extended use ‘jhfs+’. Don’t use a different type unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
- ‘name’ refers to the name of the Fusion Drive that you set in step 7.
- ‘size’ refers to the size of the Fusion Drive, use ‘100%’ unless you know exactly what you’re doing
- If your lvgUUID is ‘12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789123’, type is ‘jhfs+’, name is ‘Fusion Drive’ and size is ‘100%’, then you would enter: diskutil coreStorage createVolume 12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789123 jhfs+ ‘Fusion Drive’ 100%
- Again, don’t forget the apostrophes around the Fusion Drive name
1tb Fusion Drive Mac Mini
There you have it, you’re now the proud owner of a brand new DIY Fusion Drive for your classic Mac Pro! We have included our Terminal log below incase you would like to refer to it:
Fusion Drive is Apple Inc's implementation of a hybrid drive. Apple's implementation combines a hard disk drive with a NAND flash storage (solid-state drive of 24 GB or more)[1] and presents it as a single Core Storage managed logical volume with the space of both drives combined.[2]
The operating system automatically manages the contents of the drive so the most frequently accessed files are stored on the faster flash storage, while infrequently used items move to or stay on the hard drive.[3] For example, if spreadsheet software is used often, the software will be moved to the flash storage for faster user access. In software, this logical volume speeds up performance of the computer by performing both caching for faster writes and auto tiering for faster reads.
Availability[edit]
The Fusion Drive was announced as part of an Apple event held on October 23, 2012, with the first supporting products being two desktops: the iMac and Mac Mini with OS X Mountain Lion released in late 2012.[3] Fusion Drive remains available in subsequent models of these computers, but was not expanded to other Apple devices: the latest MacBook and Mac Pro models use exclusively flash storage, and while this was an optional upgrade for the mid-2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro discontinued by Apple, it will replace the standard hard disk drive instead of complementing it in the fashion of Fusion Drive. Supported products have the following configurations:
Release date | HDD storage | Flash storage | |
---|---|---|---|
Mac Mini | Late 2012 | 1 TB | 128 GB |
Late 2014 | |||
iMac (all models) | Late 2012 | ||
Late 2013 | |||
2014 | |||
iMac (27-inch non-Retina) | Late 2012 | 3 TB | |
Late 2013 | |||
iMac (27-inch Retina) | Late 2014 | ||
Mid-2015 | |||
iMac | Late 2015 | 1 TB | 24 GB |
2 TB | 128 GB | ||
Mid 2017 | 1 TB | 32 GB | |
2 TB | 128 GB | ||
3 TB | |||
Early 2019 | 1 TB | 32 GB | |
2 TB | 128 GB | ||
3 TB | |||
iMac (21.5-inch) | Late 2020 | 1 TB | 32 GB |
Design[edit]
Apple's Fusion Drive design incorporates proprietary features with limited documentation. It has been reported that the design of Fusion Drive has been influenced by a research project called Hystor.[4] According to the paper,[5] this hybrid storage system unifies a high-speed SSD and a large-capacity hard drive with several design considerations of which one has been used in the Fusion Drive.
- The SSD and the hard drive are logically merged into a single block device managed by the operating system, which is independent of file systems and requires no changes to applications.
- A portion of SSD space is used as a write-back buffer to absorb incoming write traffic, which hides perceivable latencies and boosts write performance.
- More frequently accessed data is stored on the SSD and the larger, less frequently accessed data stored on the HDD.
- Data movement is based on access patterns: if data has been on the HDD and suddenly becomes frequently accessed, it will usually get moved to the SSD by the program controlling the Fusion Drive. During idle periods, data is adaptively migrated to the most suitable device to provide sustained data processing performance for users.
![Fusion Drives For Mac Mini Fusion Drives For Mac Mini](/uploads/1/1/8/6/118661304/530012261.jpg)
Replace Fusion Drive Mac Mini
Several experimental studies[3][6][7][8][9][10] have been conducted to speculate about the internal mechanism of Fusion Drive. A number of speculations are available but not completely confirmed.
- Fusion Drive is a block-level solution based on Apple's Core Storage, a logical volume manager managing multiple physical devices.[6][7] The capacity of a Fusion Drive is confirmed to be the sum of two devices.[6][7] Fusion Drive is file system agnostic and effective for both HFS Plus and ZFS.[8]
- Part of the SSD space is used as a write buffer for incoming writes.[6][7] In the stable state, a minimum 4 GB space is reserved for buffering writes.[3][6][7] A small spare area is set aside on the SSD for performance consistency.[7]
- Data is promoted to the SSD based on its access frequency.[6][7] The frequency is detected at the block level [9] and below file system memory cache.[10] Data migration happens in 128 KB chunks during idle or light I/O periods.[6][7]
- Operating system and other critical documents are always cached on the SSD.[6] Applications are likely to be handled similarly.[7] A regular file can reside on both devices.[9]
See also[edit]
- bcache, dm-cache, and Flashcache on Linux
- Smart Response Technology — a similar technology from Intel (for desktops)
- ExpressCache — used on a number of Wintel laptops
- ZFS - A file system using similar technology
References[edit]
- ^Dominguez, Alberto (3 January 2019). 'The best desktop computers of 2018'. Pandora FMS. Archived from the original(html) on 3 January 2019. Retrieved 3 January 2019.
- ^Hutchinson, Lee (October 23, 2012). 'Apple Fusion Drive—wait, what? How does this work?'. Ars Technica. Condé Nast. Retrieved October 25, 2012.
- ^ abcdShimpi, Anand Lal (October 24, 2012). 'Understanding Apple's Fusion Drive'. AnandTech. Retrieved October 25, 2012.
- ^'Computer Science Research at Ohio State Makes Impact in Apple's Hybrid Storage Product'. www.cse.ohio-state.edu. 2013-04-08.
- ^'Hystor | Proceedings of the international conference on Supercomputing'. doi:10.1145/1995896.1995902. S2CID207188516.Cite journal requires
|journal=
(help) - ^ abcdefgh'Achieving fusion—with a service training doc, Ars tears open Apple's Fusion Drive'. www.arstechnica.com. 2012-11-05.
- ^ abcdefghi'A Month with Apple's Fusion Drive'. www.anandtech.com. 2013-01-18.
- ^ ab'Fusion Drive - loose ends'. jolly.jinx.de/. 2012-10-31.[unreliable source?]
- ^ abc'More on BYO Fusion drive'. jolly.jinx.de/. 2012-10-31.[unreliable source?]
- ^ ab'Fusion Drive last words'. jolly.jinx.de/. 2012-11-04.[unreliable source?]
External links[edit]
Apple Fusion Drive
- Fusion Drive – Apple's description
- Fusion Drive – Apple Knowledge Base article
Mac Fusion Drive Vs Ssd
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fusion_Drive&oldid=978075993'