'Hybrid' drives have already been in Windows (and Linux) machines for a bit. Nothing too special really.
And they really are just 2 separate hard drives, working as one with a little bit of partitioning magic...
Wow. Thanks, I guess I'm going to move to Windows now.
What's more exciting is Apple's use of Core Storage which works with data very similar to ZFS. It was a shame to see such a technology wasted solely on Filevault 2, so I'm thrilled to see it applied in other areas in OS X.
"UPDATE: careful testing shows ZERO benefit either with the Accelsior PCIe SSD or with a SATA SSD (these are both non-Apple configs, no comment here on Apple’s official setup). All that is seen with non-Apple SSD+HDD fused drives so far is simple, dumb JBOD behavior: SSD fills up, overflows to hard drive, thereafter speeds are hard drive speeds, no migration of files occurs."
I was thinking about doing this myself. Do you have the SSD plugged into the HDD port, and the HDD plugged into the Optical port, the other way around, or does it make a difference? I've only recently considered doing this so I don't know much about the pros and cons of different configurations.
I did a fair bit of digging around for information about this myself and couldn't find anything definitive about the performance difference. Still, it sounded as though the optical drive connection is SATA II while the HDD bay uses a SATA III connection which has more throughput. With that in mind, I removed the optical drive first, then moved the 750gb HDD into its place (using an OWC data doubler), and installed the SSD into the HDD bay. It's fast. Very fast.
There is one (rather glaring) drawback to this setup, however. From what I've read, the spinning HDD does not have the shock protection in the optical bay. That is, if I drop my laptop while the drive is spinning, I'll probably lose my data. If I'd left the HDD in its bay, the motion sensor would have detected the fall and retracted the drive heads. I rarely move my laptop unless it's sleeping and the MacSafe has (so-far) kept it from being knocked off the desk, so I decided the potential speed increase was worth the risk.
"UPDATE: careful testing shows ZERO benefit either with the Accelsior PCIe SSD or with a SATA SSD (these are both non-Apple configs, no comment here on Apple’s official setup). All that is seen with non-Apple SSD+HDD fused drives so far is simple, dumb JBOD behavior: SSD fills up, overflows to hard drive, thereafter speeds are hard drive speeds, no migration of files occurs."
Worth digging into further, perhaps.
Curious. The original post by jollyjinx mentioned that he connected his SSD via SATA so that SMART data could identify it as being an SSD. Perhaps this PCIe-card SSD, while insanely fast, does not provide this kind of information, and therefore Core Storage does not prioritize it?
If you are a videographer, photographer or other person that uses huge files the fusion drive is a great way to screw up your projects and corrupt all of your work.
On late model MBPs, the SATA interface to the HDD is SATA III (ie 6Gb) while the SATA interface to the optical bay is SATA II (ie 3Gb). If you buy a SSD that supports 6Gb and you don't install it in the HDD bay, you will NOT gain the maximum performance that the SSD is capable of delivering. In addition, OWC states on their website, that testing shows the SATA II interface to the optical bay (SATA II) actually can cause connection issues to SATA III devices and so they ONLY recommend using their SATA III SSD drives in the HDD slot.
You can tell if your machine supports SATA III by checking in About this Mac, System Report, Serial ATA, Link Speed.
As for shock protection, it really depends on which HDD your use. The WD Scorpio Black that I use is the model with integral shock detection and protection on the HDD controller itself. This made me feel a lot better about putting the HDD in the optical slot.
If you are a videographer, photographer or other person that uses huge files the fusion drive is a great way to screw up your projects and corrupt all of your work.
How? Why? You sure that's not just completely wrong and makes no sense?
How? Why? You sure that's not just completely wrong and makes no sense?
I haven't used the Fusion Drive, so I don't know if that's true or not, but I am kind of skeptical about it too. I'd like to know and decide where my files end up.
I'm also wondering about how backup and time machine works.
I haven't used the Fusion Drive, so I don't know if that's true or not, but I am kind of skeptical about it too. I'd like to know and decide where my files end up.
They end up exactly where you put them. "Where" you put them is physically on a different drive, is all. I imagine Time Machine is exactly the same, as the volumes are treated as one drive.
I'm not sure why this confuses people. It's just like RAID, only with two different types of drives.
[" url="/t/153951/os-x-mountain-lion-confirmed-to-support-fusion-drive-on-legacy-macs#post_2224697"]I haven't used the Fusion Drive, so I don't know if that's true or not, but I am kind of skeptical about it too. I'd like to know and decide where my files end up.
Maybe no one has explained it to you, but even with a conventional hard drive, you don't get to decide where your files end up. The OS (or maybe the drive firmware) chooses where to place your data on the platter. That's not something you get to choose.
Why would Fusion be any different? The only possible problem is that you now have two devices and failure of either one could lose any files that are spread across both devices, but since SSDs are far more reliable than HDDs, that's not likely to be significant. It's the same problem as using RAID 0 (except that the SSD reliability is so high).
In any event, if you're uncomfortable with it, then simply don't buy the Fusion option. Problem solved. I also suspect that you'll be able to reformat the two drives separately, but I'm not sure about that.
[" url="/t/153951/os-x-mountain-lion-confirmed-to-support-fusion-drive-on-legacy-macs#post_2224697"]I haven't used the Fusion Drive, so I don't know if that's true or not, but I am kind of skeptical about it too. I'd like to know and decide where my files end up.
I'm also wondering about how backup and time machine works.
I know for a fact that Time Machine works on a Volume level (and not on a disk level). If you open up your Time Machine hard drive in the Finder you will see the following structure:
Backups.backupdb > [Your Machine Name Here] > [A boat load of dates for folders] > [Your Logical Volume Names]
So a Fusion Drive (which is two drives fused together) is one Logical Volume. That Logical Volume will be backup up that way in Time Machine.
I've also modded my late 2011 MBP. I installed the SSD in the hard drive bay because the SATA connection is a full 6 Gigabit Negotiated Link Speedand moved the hard drive to the optical drive bay which has a 3 Gigabit connection. I used a cheap adapter which I bought from from a Chinese firm on Ebay. Even configured as two separate drives, the speed increase is far greater than any processor upgrade. Battery life is way better and Time Machine will backup and restore both drives without a problem. Now if you want to restore just one drive, that gets a little trickier as you have to enter Time Machine and pick out the individual drive to restore. You'll also need a small program named "Trim Enabler" by Oskar Groth (Groths.org/Cindori.se) to keep the SSD in good shape.
Google, Yahoo, or Bing around the web; there's plenty of info on how to do this.
Awesome, thanks Waybac. I just ordered the Optical to HDD drive conversion kit from ifixit. It was 15 bucks more than a similar rig on eBay, but ifixit has a good reputation, and their forums have helped me out of a rough spot more than a couple times so I'm happy to support the mothership, so to speak. I'd been waiting on 480gb or 512gb SSD prices to drop when one of my friends asked me why I don't just do what you did, seeing how 256gb and lower SSD's are all going for a song right now. I'm pretty sure the SATA interface on the 2009's is only 3gb not 6 like your 2011, but I should still see some noticeable speed and battery life increases. Thanks for your advice.
If only the retina MBP had an optical drive I could remove /s
Well if ifixit or some Asian company comes out with a thin ribbon interface cable, it should be possible to slip a thin 2.5" standard SSD or even an HDD into that cage that sits under the trackpad. It wouldn't be the same as having two drives (one for speed, one for space) but it would be immensely cheaper than going with their upgrade route.
Well if ifixit or some Asian company comes out with a thin ribbon interface cable, it should be possible to slip a thin 2.5" standard SSD or even an HDD into that cage that sits under the trackpad. It wouldn't be the same as having two drives (one for speed, one for space) but it would be immensely cheaper than going with their upgrade route.
Where would the ribbon cable connect to though? You mean instead of the "regular" SSD module? I somehow doubt they would have left enough room for even a thin 2.5" HDD, but its an interesting thought.
Meanwhile i'll be waiting for the OWC Aura Pro 480 GB SSD to come down in price a little bit and go for that. It looks like a screamer and you can reuse the 256 GB module !!
Well I just finished setting mine up. I have the 17" MBP and a 24GB Express Card SSD (cheap on eBay). I Time Machine backed up the computer, booted from the 10.8.2 installer USB stick I created. Ran Terminal and issued the commands as in the original post. Discovered that the name of the device was bla and the volume was blub, so figured out how to delete the Fusion drive and recreated it, named the device "Fusion Drive" and the volume "Macintosh HD", and after several attempts allocated the biggest volume on the two drives I could.
Installed the OS off the USB stick and then tested the boot speed. Since everything was still on the SSD at this point it was fast, 10 seconds. I then ran Migration Assistant and returned everything from the TM backup. When I came down in the morning there was my machine all ready to go. Logged out of the Temp user and booted. 25 seconds. Urk.
So I opened a Terminal window and started iostat to watch the two drives and see when I was read/writing to one or the other. For the first couple of hours both were busy, but eventually the HDD went to 0.00 KB/t. After a few hours of this I let the backup run and that took another few hours (to Time Capsule), but it worked like normally. It's just one logical volume that it's backing up and it doesn't care which drive the files are on.
Now that the day is done I can see the SSD always working even when the computer is just idling, and often the HDD has no activity. Many of the programs I leave open generate no activity on the HDD. Looks like for the apps I have open it has already optimized. Too bad about the boot speed, but since I don't do that over and over, I am not stressing. Everything is currently very fast, and I am very happy.
I cant understand how you "techie" guys that frequent these forums can have so much trouble with basic concepts. It is "One" volume to the user. It is "One" volume to Time Machine. Don't insist on complicating this. You backup the "One" volume. If it fails, you replace the failed component, whether it be the SSD or the HDD, and restore the "One" volume. The OS will load the SSD until it is full, then finish up loading the HDD. Then when you use the computer, the OS will do it's magic and allocate and re-allocate all the data, OS, Apps, documents, etc. That's the whole point of Apple's implementation. You don't have to worry about it.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mikeb85
'Hybrid' drives have already been in Windows (and Linux) machines for a bit. Nothing too special really.
And they really are just 2 separate hard drives, working as one with a little bit of partitioning magic...
Wow. Thanks, I guess I'm going to move to Windows now.
What's more exciting is Apple's use of Core Storage which works with data very similar to ZFS. It was a shame to see such a technology wasted solely on Filevault 2, so I'm thrilled to see it applied in other areas in OS X.
(see http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/04/mac-osx-lion-corestorage-volume-manager/ if you're unsure about CS and curious)
Originally Posted by Mikeb85
'Hybrid' drives have already been in Windows (and Linux) machines for a bit. Nothing too special really.
Only because you refuse to educate yourself.
From Lloyd Chambers, who tried this approach and blogged the results:
http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2012/20121031_2-Fusion-performance.html
"UPDATE: careful testing shows ZERO benefit either with the Accelsior PCIe SSD or with a SATA SSD (these are both non-Apple configs, no comment here on Apple’s official setup). All that is seen with non-Apple SSD+HDD fused drives so far is simple, dumb JBOD behavior: SSD fills up, overflows to hard drive, thereafter speeds are hard drive speeds, no migration of files occurs."
Worth digging into further, perhaps.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cash907
I was thinking about doing this myself. Do you have the SSD plugged into the HDD port, and the HDD plugged into the Optical port, the other way around, or does it make a difference? I've only recently considered doing this so I don't know much about the pros and cons of different configurations.
I did a fair bit of digging around for information about this myself and couldn't find anything definitive about the performance difference. Still, it sounded as though the optical drive connection is SATA II while the HDD bay uses a SATA III connection which has more throughput. With that in mind, I removed the optical drive first, then moved the 750gb HDD into its place (using an OWC data doubler), and installed the SSD into the HDD bay. It's fast. Very fast.
There is one (rather glaring) drawback to this setup, however. From what I've read, the spinning HDD does not have the shock protection in the optical bay. That is, if I drop my laptop while the drive is spinning, I'll probably lose my data. If I'd left the HDD in its bay, the motion sensor would have detected the fall and retracted the drive heads. I rarely move my laptop unless it's sleeping and the MacSafe has (so-far) kept it from being knocked off the desk, so I decided the potential speed increase was worth the risk.
Quote:
Originally Posted by theo57
From Lloyd Chambers, who tried this approach and blogged the results:
http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2012/20121031_2-Fusion-performance.html
"UPDATE: careful testing shows ZERO benefit either with the Accelsior PCIe SSD or with a SATA SSD (these are both non-Apple configs, no comment here on Apple’s official setup). All that is seen with non-Apple SSD+HDD fused drives so far is simple, dumb JBOD behavior: SSD fills up, overflows to hard drive, thereafter speeds are hard drive speeds, no migration of files occurs."
Worth digging into further, perhaps.
Curious. The original post by jollyjinx mentioned that he connected his SSD via SATA so that SMART data could identify it as being an SSD. Perhaps this PCIe-card SSD, while insanely fast, does not provide this kind of information, and therefore Core Storage does not prioritize it?
On late model MBPs, the SATA interface to the HDD is SATA III (ie 6Gb) while the SATA interface to the optical bay is SATA II (ie 3Gb). If you buy a SSD that supports 6Gb and you don't install it in the HDD bay, you will NOT gain the maximum performance that the SSD is capable of delivering. In addition, OWC states on their website, that testing shows the SATA II interface to the optical bay (SATA II) actually can cause connection issues to SATA III devices and so they ONLY recommend using their SATA III SSD drives in the HDD slot.
You can tell if your machine supports SATA III by checking in About this Mac, System Report, Serial ATA, Link Speed.
As for shock protection, it really depends on which HDD your use. The WD Scorpio Black that I use is the model with integral shock detection and protection on the HDD controller itself. This made me feel a lot better about putting the HDD in the optical slot.
Originally Posted by justamacguy
If you are a videographer, photographer or other person that uses huge files the fusion drive is a great way to screw up your projects and corrupt all of your work.
How? Why? You sure that's not just completely wrong and makes no sense?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
How? Why? You sure that's not just completely wrong and makes no sense?
I haven't used the Fusion Drive, so I don't know if that's true or not, but I am kind of skeptical about it too. I'd like to know and decide where my files end up.
I'm also wondering about how backup and time machine works.
Originally Posted by Apple ][
I haven't used the Fusion Drive, so I don't know if that's true or not, but I am kind of skeptical about it too. I'd like to know and decide where my files end up.
They end up exactly where you put them. "Where" you put them is physically on a different drive, is all. I imagine Time Machine is exactly the same, as the volumes are treated as one drive.
I'm not sure why this confuses people. It's just like RAID, only with two different types of drives.
Maybe no one has explained it to you, but even with a conventional hard drive, you don't get to decide where your files end up. The OS (or maybe the drive firmware) chooses where to place your data on the platter. That's not something you get to choose.
Why would Fusion be any different? The only possible problem is that you now have two devices and failure of either one could lose any files that are spread across both devices, but since SSDs are far more reliable than HDDs, that's not likely to be significant. It's the same problem as using RAID 0 (except that the SSD reliability is so high).
In any event, if you're uncomfortable with it, then simply don't buy the Fusion option. Problem solved. I also suspect that you'll be able to reformat the two drives separately, but I'm not sure about that.
I know for a fact that Time Machine works on a Volume level (and not on a disk level). If you open up your Time Machine hard drive in the Finder you will see the following structure:
Backups.backupdb > [Your Machine Name Here] > [A boat load of dates for folders] > [Your Logical Volume Names]
So a Fusion Drive (which is two drives fused together) is one Logical Volume. That Logical Volume will be backup up that way in Time Machine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by waybacmac
I've also modded my late 2011 MBP. I installed the SSD in the hard drive bay because the SATA connection is a full 6 Gigabit Negotiated Link Speed and moved the hard drive to the optical drive bay which has a 3 Gigabit connection. I used a cheap adapter which I bought from from a Chinese firm on Ebay. Even configured as two separate drives, the speed increase is far greater than any processor upgrade. Battery life is way better and Time Machine will backup and restore both drives without a problem. Now if you want to restore just one drive, that gets a little trickier as you have to enter Time Machine and pick out the individual drive to restore. You'll also need a small program named "Trim Enabler" by Oskar Groth (Groths.org/Cindori.se) to keep the SSD in good shape.
Google, Yahoo, or Bing around the web; there's plenty of info on how to do this.
Awesome, thanks Waybac. I just ordered the Optical to HDD drive conversion kit from ifixit. It was 15 bucks more than a similar rig on eBay, but ifixit has a good reputation, and their forums have helped me out of a rough spot more than a couple times so I'm happy to support the mothership, so to speak. I'd been waiting on 480gb or 512gb SSD prices to drop when one of my friends asked me why I don't just do what you did, seeing how 256gb and lower SSD's are all going for a song right now. I'm pretty sure the SATA interface on the 2009's is only 3gb not 6 like your 2011, but I should still see some noticeable speed and battery life increases. Thanks for your advice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by seltzdesign
If only the retina MBP had an optical drive I could remove
Well if ifixit or some Asian company comes out with a thin ribbon interface cable, it should be possible to slip a thin 2.5" standard SSD or even an HDD into that cage that sits under the trackpad. It wouldn't be the same as having two drives (one for speed, one for space) but it would be immensely cheaper than going with their upgrade route.
Quote:
Well if ifixit or some Asian company comes out with a thin ribbon interface cable, it should be possible to slip a thin 2.5" standard SSD or even an HDD into that cage that sits under the trackpad. It wouldn't be the same as having two drives (one for speed, one for space) but it would be immensely cheaper than going with their upgrade route.
Where would the ribbon cable connect to though? You mean instead of the "regular" SSD module? I somehow doubt they would have left enough room for even a thin 2.5" HDD, but its an interesting thought.
Meanwhile i'll be waiting for the OWC Aura Pro 480 GB SSD to come down in price a little bit and go for that. It looks like a screamer and you can reuse the 256 GB module !!
Well I just finished setting mine up. I have the 17" MBP and a 24GB Express Card SSD (cheap on eBay). I Time Machine backed up the computer, booted from the 10.8.2 installer USB stick I created. Ran Terminal and issued the commands as in the original post. Discovered that the name of the device was bla and the volume was blub, so figured out how to delete the Fusion drive and recreated it, named the device "Fusion Drive" and the volume "Macintosh HD", and after several attempts allocated the biggest volume on the two drives I could.
Installed the OS off the USB stick and then tested the boot speed. Since everything was still on the SSD at this point it was fast, 10 seconds. I then ran Migration Assistant and returned everything from the TM backup. When I came down in the morning there was my machine all ready to go. Logged out of the Temp user and booted. 25 seconds. Urk.
So I opened a Terminal window and started iostat to watch the two drives and see when I was read/writing to one or the other. For the first couple of hours both were busy, but eventually the HDD went to 0.00 KB/t. After a few hours of this I let the backup run and that took another few hours (to Time Capsule), but it worked like normally. It's just one logical volume that it's backing up and it doesn't care which drive the files are on.
Now that the day is done I can see the SSD always working even when the computer is just idling, and often the HDD has no activity. Many of the programs I leave open generate no activity on the HDD. Looks like for the apps I have open it has already optimized. Too bad about the boot speed, but since I don't do that over and over, I am not stressing. Everything is currently very fast, and I am very happy.
-Randy
I cant understand how you "techie" guys that frequent these forums can have so much trouble with basic concepts. It is "One" volume to the user. It is "One" volume to Time Machine. Don't insist on complicating this. You backup the "One" volume. If it fails, you replace the failed component, whether it be the SSD or the HDD, and restore the "One" volume. The OS will load the SSD until it is full, then finish up loading the HDD. Then when you use the computer, the OS will do it's magic and allocate and re-allocate all the data, OS, Apps, documents, etc. That's the whole point of Apple's implementation. You don't have to worry about it.