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Apple’s fancy new Fusion Drive promises to couple an SSD with a traditional hard drive for large-scale storage with lightning fast boot up and program launches. But a developer found Mountain Lion already packs support for Fusion Drive, meaning that with an SSD, a hard drive, and a bit of Terminal magic, you can create your own homebrew Fusion Drive right now for your old Mac.
The process, well, it isn’t exactly plug-and-play, and you’ll need to know what you’re doing with the Terminal version of Disk Utility, but it doesn’t sound that complicated. There’s no telling whether Apple’ll give you an easier way to do it in the future — a Fusion Drive utility of some sorts — or whether some enterprising developer will create a tool for us all, but I wouldn’t use this for your primary setup just now.
Still, a speed boost for your old Mac without having to fork out horrendous sums on a large SSD sounds like a great plan to me, especially if the Fusion Drive actually works as promised, unlike other lame-duck SSD-hard drive hybrids. [Patrick Stein via Apple Insider]
Wonder if this will work with the duel boot facility…
dual boot even… ohh we can have OSX and Win8 in a fight to the death!
I’m sure that in the video when they were announced the Apple bloke (I forget his name) said that the logic for it was already in Mac OS.
Phil Schiller I believe and yes, it’s part of Mountain Lion.
I still really don’t see why this is “fancy” or “new”. mSATA/HDD configurations have been out for some time now – just without the fancy “Fusion” brand (cue Patent battle).
And I wouldn’t exactly call a Seagate Momentus XT (especially the new 750gb one I have) a “lame duck”. It’s a perfect retrofit, plug ‘n’ play hybrid, and seeing it’s all managed hardware side there’s no mucking about with configuation (you know, “it just works”).
I proof read the article and nowhere does it say that this is fancy or new, nor do I remember anyone saying this is new?
But I’m guessing the fusion drive will do alot of work software wise as well as hardware wise, giving it the advantage over older hybrid drives.
First line of the article:
“Apple’s fancy new Fusion Drive promises…”
Uses both the words “fancy” and “new”.
Doing work “software wise” means that all the data management has to be done on software side and not done by optimised hardware, which takes up CPU, hence slower. Like software RAID, etc.
From what I have read it is a bit more complicated than just a standard Hybrid drive.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/apple-fusion-drive-wait-what-how-does-this-work/
Correction: a bit more simple than a hybrid drive.
It’s not exactly rocket science to analyse file usage and move files about.
Better to have a fast hardware block-level system if you ask me.
From what I can research it’s basically a mSATA SSD + HDD configuration, along with Apple’s version of Intel SRT (which came standard in Intel Sandy Bridge chipsets in 2011).
Still from the article, it’s probably easier to drip in a Hybrid to speed up your old hardware rather than faffing about with SSD/HDD drives (which I presume you can’t do anyway on a MacBook, etc)
The Momentus XT had a lot of promise, but in my personal experience, does not work as advertised. After about a month, it all slows down again. In fact, I swapped back to a bigger HDD because it wasn’t doing what it said on the tin. Personally, I’m waiting for a 512GB SSD to hit the £250 mark, then that’ll end up being my only drive (in a MacBook Pro).
I guess you have an older MacBook Pro? Disks on the latest MacBook Pro iterations are non-replaceble, right?
I also yearn for the 512GB SSD under £250.00,
Chuck it in my 2010 Macbook. speed that bugger up.
So very close:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004W2JL3Y
I’m sure if you keep an eye on HotUKDeals (which I’m sure Giz UK will keep us informed!) and use various Quidco/cashback/voucher code deals, I’m sure you can get one under the £250 mark.
So close yet so far, it’s that extra £30… it just dosent seem right.
Also I am just hoping to fit this in my Macbook http://goo.gl/ArdyF – Does any one know if a 2.5″ SSD Will just fit and work? would I have to re install the OS (Lion)(not to assed abut the current data, can just transfer to portable HDD.
As I mentioned, if you play the Quidco/voucher codes, you could knock 10%-15% off (not necessarily Amazon) to get it under the mark. Or you could just wait a bit.
Hardware wise, you should just be able to slot it in. I can’t speak for Mac, but for Windows you can get a bunch of drive cloners so you can just run a low level copy, swap out the drive and go.
Or you can use the opportunity to reinstall a fresh shiny copy of the OS.
Works fine and really easy. If you’re swapping the HDD for an SSD you can either reinstall Lion and drop in your time machine backup or clone your drive. My preference was to actually swap the optical drive for a 2nd hard drive. But put the HDD in the optical slot rather than the SSD as it’s got a slower SATA bus.
I’m not 100% sure if my Mac has 2 slots?
Is it a MacBook?
Ah, you said it was. So the Optical drive uses a sata slot same as your hard drive. You have to buy an adaptor plate from amazon or ebay for a few quid but then you can literally whip out your DVD drive and put a hard drive in its place.
Ahh, cool, I shall look in to that. Yea it’s the last plastic white Macbook, don’t use the DVD Drive at all any way.
Cheers
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icy-Box-IB-AC642-Extension-Enclosure/dp/B007IXPQMY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1351780365&sr=8-2
Is that what I’m looking for? I have no idea what to look for
Yep, that has the external enclosure too so you can still hook up your DVD drive if you need it.
I used this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unibody-Macbook-Selected-Replace-Optical/dp/B008F89KKA/ref=sr_1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1351780776&sr=1-3 but much the same.
Best of luck.
I’ve had a Momentus XT for some many months now and it works great. The 750gb is a lot better than the older 500gb one with both larger and read/write caching.
I remember the 500gb was mediocre but hey, it was the first kid on the block.
Personally now that I’ve gone 100% SSD I can’t go back. Now that 2XXgb SSD’s are under the £100 mark (I reckon a matter of months before 512′s are under £250), it’s quickly becoming a no-brainer.
I couldn’t wait, so I put a 250GB SSD in my iMac, I use a 1TB HDD connected over Firewire 2 for all my ‘media’, it’s just applications and system stuff on my SSD.
None of the media is particularly huge – there are some 1080p videos that play through at around 5Mbps, but nothing the Firewire connection can’t handle.
what are you really upset about? the fact that ‘fusion drive’ sounds better than ‘Seagate Momentus XT’?
Pretty much. In the same way restaurants have “Poisson frite avec pommes de terre”. And charge you 4 times the price of chippy across the road.
i’m having fish and chips later, how did you know? hmm.
Turn around and look out your window…
so…hard…not…to……….
hang on. how’d you know there’s a window in this room…
He goes for Creepy.. He shoots.. He Scores!
Creepin’ sure beats Trollin’. Arguments tend to be a lot shorter when you know what they’re typing over their shoulder beforehand.
Fusion is basically a software tiering system paired with a hybrid drive.
This particular article is exciting because it allows you to effectively take an SSD and a separate HDD, mount them as a single volume (not a RAID 0 stripe) and the system tiers your data automatically.
I was running some tests on this earlier as I’d read the article on Life Hacker and I’m confident I’ll have it working over the weekend. My particular MacBook Pro has an HDD and an SSD in it as I’ve swapped out the Optical bay for a 2nd hard drive so this would be perfect for me. I’m currently resorting to Symlinks and manually dragging data into the slow hard drive (iTunes and iPhoto data for example) and repathing the indexes.
Right. All done. It was very easy in the end. The perception of the user experience is almost exactly the same as it was when I had all the good stuff on SSD and the bad stuff on HDD except everything’s in one logical 500gb drive and no symlinks, no manual pointing, no proactive relocation of data.
Loving it!
or just buy another no doubt much cheaper hybrid drive, or just buy an ssd cache drive
The idea of flash cache and hybrids is very different to software tiering