To Fusion drive or not to Fusion drive, that is the question

[Feek]

I have a mid 2011 27” i7 iMac with the fastest CPU option that was available at the time. It was an insurance claim so I ordered it with the 250Gb SSD and 2Tb HDD.

Fusion drives weren’t available at the time.

I keep my iTunes library on the mechanical drive along with some folders that I use for temporary storage, downloads, etc. Generally the SSD is about half full and the HDD is 80% full. I have an external firewire hard drive used as another archive drive where even less frequently used files are stored. Everything is backed up.

I’ve been thinking about converting the two internal drives into a Fusion drive for some time for no other reason than it’s something to do. I’ve never felt that the system is slow and neither have I suffered from slow file access.

Is it worth even considering doing this? It’s simple enough to do, I’d just SuperDuper! the two internal drives off to external backups, boot from an external plain vanilla Yosemite disk that I’ve got set up, run the commands to make the Fusion drive and then simply SuperDuper! my main boot drive back on and copy the other stuff back. It would just be a slow process.

In an ideal world, I’d increase the internal HDD to a 4Tb but it was the 2011 iMacs which introduced the temperature sensor thing which made it difficult to do and I’m not sure how straightforward it would be to get around that. If I could do that (at a sensible price), I’d set up a Fusion drive without a second thought and dump the external drive I currently use.

Anyway, what do you think?

 

[Feek]

Well I've done some more searching and it looks like I can get an OWC module to allow me to slap a bigger HDD in the iMac so when I get my overtime through next week I'm going to order that along with a 4Tb drive which I'll put in the iMac and make it into a single Fusion volume.

 

[ikillbears]

for the stupid among us. in simpleton speak. what is fusion drive. I've had a look around but nothing seems to straight forwardly explain it

 

[Feek]

Here you go, everything you need to know: *click*

"A Fusion Drive's components appear as a single volume in the Finder, with their capacities merged. No adjustment needs to be made to how you work, as decisions about which of the two components is used to store a given piece of information are made for you.

Neither of the drives holds a complete copy of everything. When something needs to be stored, it's always first written to the flash storage. As long as plenty of free flash storage is available, OS X doesn't touch the hard drive, and the Mac will operate solely from its flash storage.

Behind the scenes, OS X silently monitors how your Mac is used. When free flash storage dwindles to only 4GB, OS X's long-term observations are used to decide what you're least likely to need from day to day, and it moves some of it to the hard drive. This keeps plenty of flash storage available so that high performance is maintained."

 

[Captain]

for the stupid among us. in simpleton speak. what is fusion drive. I've had a look around but nothing seems to straight forwardly explain it

In simple terms, it used the HDD and the SSD in the machine together and combines the space.

What it does is takes the most used software and runs them from the SSD as it's faster than the HDD and the software that isn't really used that often runs from the HDD.

 

[Feek]

Realistically my dilemma is now - 4Tb drive made into a Fusion with my SSD or an Apple Watch.

 

[ikillbears]

my experience. first gen apple stuff is usually a no go. well its a go but then the second comes out and you slightly kick your self you didnt wait

 

[whiskycycle]

Realistically my dilemma is now - 4Tb drive made into a Fusion with my SSD or an Apple Watch.

Easy... Fusion drive!

Just done one on an old 2011 Mac Mini i7 I'm using... replaced one of the mirrored drives with an SSD and set it all up. Works a treat and is very nice to use. No thinking about where to stuff data now, although a quick run of Trim Enabler for non-Apple SSD following OS patches, but it's fine otherwise.

For the Watch, I'd have a fiddle, but not as a gen 1 device... I've let my toy-addicted neighbour take the plunge and will just have a look at his.

 

[Feek]

Yeah, I think I'm decided now. I'm going to grab the thermal sensor kit (which is about £50) and a Hitachi 4Tb drive and make a Fusion drive out of it.

I'm a bit nervous about ripping the iMac apart though. It looks straightforward enough and although I'm very experienced with computer hardware and electronics, I'm just a little conscious that it could go badly wrong.

 

[shiver]

No scope to upgrade the SSD whilst you're there?

Can't remember what SSDs used in for 2011s but I wouldn't be surprised if you'd be able to get a decent 500GB + one for it

 

[Feek]

I did consider that but I'm not unhappy with the one that's in there now - I'd have to run yet another adapter and then faff about with TRIM enabler and that's just a minor hassle I don't want to bother with.

 

[Phate]

Yeah, I think I'm decided now. I'm going to grab the thermal sensor kit (which is about £50) and a Hitachi 4Tb drive and make a Fusion drive out of it.

I'm a bit nervous about ripping the iMac apart though. It looks straightforward enough and although I'm very experienced with computer hardware and electronics, I'm just a little conscious that it could go badly wrong.

It's really quite simple. You said you're experienced. Take your time, don't rush, it'll be fine.

I'm planning on dismantling mine soon (same model as yours), I was going to replace the dead Superdrive with a HDD for additional storage, but now a kit is available to be able to replace the original 1TB I'll just do that and probably fusion it as well. I fitted my own 240GB SSD before I even turned it on out of the box - this will also allow me to keep an internal dvd burner, handy.

 

[Feek]

Payday today. OWC kit and 4Tb drive ordered. Shame Monday is a bank holiday!

 

[bloodiedathame]

Just remember that the majority of the fusion drive is still a mechanical drive. If you're editing 2k-4k footage on it etc, it will still read/write like one, and won't play back smoothly. Boot and app launch is very fast on the one we have in a work iMac, as expected, but I'd rather we had a large SSD in the iMac. Hope it works for you though Feek.

 

[Feek]

Most of my data is media in iTunes. Once everything is consolidated, I reckon around 3Tb is very static so it should work well for me.

 

[NickK]

I have a 1TB laptop drive as an external drive -IIRC it's an 8GB SLC SSD in the controller, all controlled by the HD itself. Performs really well as this is for large amounts of astro-capture and out performs the mac mini internal drive!

My only concern is how long the SSD will work and when if fails can I still get to the remainder of the data on the HD..

 

[Durzel]

My 3TB Fusion drive died after about 2.5 years, necessitating a trip to local Apple store. They actually damaged (and replaced) the screen getting it out. I'm not sure I rate the Seagate component of it to be honest.

 

[Feek]

All done

Just copying files back over now from the old internal HD to the new Fusion volume. It all went without a hitch, even swapping the physical drive out wasn't too difficult really, I reckon that took less than twenty minutes.

What's going to be slow is copying 1.5Tb of data back from an external drive. Even using firewire, it estimates 10 hours.

 

[ChrisD.]

Good work.

I sent my iMac with 1TB fusion drive back and now have just 1TB of Flash storage.

 

[Phate]

When I moved all my data to my NAS originally that was around 3TB...

I kicked it off before I went away for the weekend