Inspired by an Jinx’s article about building your own Apple fusion drive I’ve decided to take it one step further and brew my own with full Os X installation on it.
Here is how I did it.
First things first, I needed to put two drives in my Mac. I already had Crucial M4 SSD and 500GB HDD so I bought hard drive caddy and put my 500GB Momentus XT in it:
Here you can see both my SSD and HDD installed in late 2010 unibody MacBook Pro:
That was the easy part. Now how to make them work? I Jinx’s article you can read that GUI Disk Util does not offer needed functionality. It’s available only in command line version. But from my previous installation I remembered that there is acces to terminal in Os X recovery mode:
It was downhill from there. Create Logical Volume Group:
get UUID:
Create volume:
As you can see Os X Installation recognized such volume:
and installed nicely. After the whole process was over I’ve done similar to Jinx’s tests and the drive indeed behaves like fusion – more often used files end up on the SSD and less needed are being shuffled to the HDD.
Mission accomplished!
Hello, Guys,
Please advise something: problems with booting.
I have installed new hardware: SSD 250GB and 1TB SATA drives in my MacBookPro late 2010. Trying to boot from DVD, the installer starts but freezes after sometime and nothing happens. So I cannot reformat the drives as have problems with booting: the same happens whether I use bootable USB stick or dvd (still have original OSX system with under mavericks on 250 SATA drive).
What else can one try here to boot from external source?
Thanks,
Maggie
The only option left is booting from the internet. If your Mac does not find any usable boot source locally it tries to connect to the internet and download rescue image directly from Apple. Google up Apple Internet Recovery to find out more details.
Good work — I did this on my Mac mini but needed some updated info for it to go smoothly with 10.9 Mavericks, which I wrote up on my blog:
http://mschausprojects.blogspot.com/2014/01/installing-diy-fusion-drive-into-2011.html
Thanks!
it would be great if this will updated for os x yosemite!
thanks!
I’m sorry but since I’ve completely switched to SSD drives I no longer have hardware needed for updating this tutorial.