Encryption and Fusion: MacDrive also does not support encrypted disks (e.g. Using FileVault), or Fusion drives. Both of these drive types require additional software to be used, and for that reason, require the Mac OS. STEP 3: Check that Windows recognizes the device correctly. A common cause is failed connectivity on your Windows system. FUSION DRIVE – APFS macOS Mojave. Use the Disk Manager to identify the logical volume of the APFS Fusion drive. The logical volume will be displayed underneath the APFS Synthesized Volume (disk2 in the image below). The examiner will have to decrypt the volume (disk2s1in the image below) if the Mac has FileVault enabled.
This past Friday a package from Amazon was delivered for me and this is what I found inside (all Amazon affiliate links):
So. Cool.
That’s a lot of speed and quite a bit of work up there. The overall project, from start to finish took over a day, but it was split into three different parts.
- Swap wife’s 500 GB “spinning rust drive” for the 500 GB Samsung 840 Series SSD.
- Install old 500 GB drive into 2.5″ USB enclosure.
- Boot off of old 500 GB drive in USB enclosure and use SuperDuper! to create an exact copy on the new 500 GB SSD.
- Boot from new 500 GB SSD and confirm that things are working.
- Start and complete Time Machine backup before moving on.
That all went pretty smoothly. The longest step was #3 above as I copied everything over from the old hard drive, over USB 2.0, to the SSD. After the Time Machine backup was completed, then it was time to move onto Part Two.
- Take the “old” 500 GB drive in the external enclosure and hook it up to my work laptop.
- Clone current drive to the 500 GB drive.
- Take apart the external enclosure and swap the newly cloned drive for the 500 GB WD Scorpio Black that was currently the internal drive for the MacBook Pro.
- Boot off of the now-internal-old-drive-from-MacBook and verify things are working.
- Start a clone of the now-working drive to the new 750 GB external drive I had just received from Amazon.
When it was all said and done, the original drive for my 2011 MacBook Pro was back inside and being used as the boot drive. It is slower (the Scorpio Black is a 7200 RPM drive and the standard Apple-supplied drive is 5400 RPM), but I’m anticipating moving to an SSD at work soon too. This is just a preemptive strike in that direction.
Once the clone was started, I moved onto the main event.
- Create a new clone of the Mac mini to an existing 500 GB USB 3.0 external hard drive.
- Take apart the Mac mini … completely.
- Use the OSB Data Double to install the 250 GB Samsung 840 Series SSD.
- Swap the standard internal 2.5″ 500 GB hard drive for the 500 GB Western Digital Scorpio Black I had just take out of the 2011 MacBook Pro.
- Put the Mac mini together … almost.
- Find that you forgot a single screw for the power supply.
- Take apart of the Mac mini … completely … again.
- Put the Mac mini together.
- Boot off of the new clone you made before you took the Mac mini apart.
- Create a new Fusion Drive using the command line version of Disk Utility.
- Clone your system onto the new Fusion Drive.
- Boot off of your new Fusion Drive and confirm things are working.
- Start and complete a Time Machine backup.
- Breathe.
If I wouldn’t have forgotten that screw, things would have gone a lot smoother. Luckily, it wasn’t a huge deal and I did get everything back together again without causing any damage. The Mac mini really is quite the dense piece of hardware and quite a bit of fun to take apart. Not for the novice, but if you have taken apart a laptop, the Mac mini is no more difficult.
Setting up the Fusion Drive using the SSD + HDD was quite simple once I dropped down to the CLI and just followed the directions. Cloning was quick over USB 3.0 and then things, really, just worked.
I was, however, not done.
After it was all done, I had three external hard drives all sitting on my desk, but they did not currently have the appropriate machines cloned onto them. So I started SuperDuper! on each machine and hooked up the drives the following way:
- 2009 MacBook – Former boot drive from Mac mini in USB 2.0 external enclosure
- 2011 MacBook Pro – Old 500 GB WD My Passport USB 3.0 external hard drive
- 2012 Mac mini – New 750 GB WD My Passport USB 3.0 external hard drive
Each machine attached to a drive of the proper size. I now have a clone of each machine along with Time Machine backups to my Time Capsule for the 2009 MacBook and 2012 Mac mini and CrashPlan online backups of all three.
That is really nice.
Was it worth all of the time and effort?
Absolutely. The oldest device, the 2009 MacBook, now feels like an entirely new machine. Adding an SSD has bought me some time, hopefully at least a year, until I need to seriously consider getting a new device for my wife to use. The biggest “win” is for Aperture, as it now loads after only a bounce or two and is much more usable than before.
That is really cool because that is the one application causing my wife the most trouble.
For the Mac mini, the Fusion Drive has been great. Having a 256 GB SSD means that everything is currently stored on the SSD. As I add more media, I will see if the performance is the same, but it is really nice to be back on an SSD and have the added storage of a “spinning rust” disk.
If you are getting a Mac and need a huge amount of storage, I would recommend looking at a Fusion Drive. If you don’t want to pull your Mac apart, just have Apple give you one and be happy. Be aware that YOU NEED TO BE BACKING UP EVERYTHING BECAUSE IF ONE DRIVE DIES EVERYTHING GOES AWAY. With that said, the speed increase is amazing.
However, if you have the technical acumen, feel free to do it yourself. It is not a big deal and can be quite a bit of fun.
Fusion Drive is Apple Inc.'s name for its 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 |
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.
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]
Fusion Drive Space Ship
- ^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.
- ^Feng Chen, David Koufaty, Xiaodong Zhang, 'Hystor: making the best usage of Solid State Drives in high performance storage systems', Proceedings of 25th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), 2011. http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/hpcs/WWW/HTML/publications/abs11-6.html
- ^ 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?]
Manual Fusion Drive Mac 2017
External links[edit]
- Fusion Drive – Apple's description
- Fusion Drive – Apple Knowledge Base article
Fusion Drive Review
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fusion_Drive&oldid=910985153'