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!