Best SSD to DIY a Fusion Drive.

Hi there, I'd like to know if any of you have personally a SSD brand you trust. I once purchased a SanDisk SSD for my work computer which failed before a year of usage. Later I purchased a Crucial/Micron SSD for my iMac which seems to be failing now, around only over 6 months of usage. I've replaced the SanDisk with a Kingston in my work computer but I'm not sure if it'll last at all.
For my iMac, though I've lost confidence in SSDs and I feel tempted to rely solely on the HDD, I'd like to know if you can advise other very reliable SSD options since the speed of a Fusion Drive is just spectacular.
Any recommendation? Thanks in advance.
Jorge...

Do a Google search on the various brands and read the reviews about them. I haven't read of any that are outright unreliable. I haven't seen complaints about these drives failing in this forum or on PC forums. Like any piece of electromic equipment some will fail, that goes for SSD's as well as HDD's.
When you installed this SSD did you take precautions against static? Are you sure you followed all the steps in the installation process EXACTLY? Opening a newer iMac and installing a drive (SSD or HDD) is frought with pittfalls. One bad move and you can create big problems for yourself. With that said I've installed 3 HDD's and 2 SSD's in three different iMacs without problems. However I am very careful to work in a static free environment (wrist strap, static mat, etc.) I handle the components as little as possible, and take care that they are seated properly inside the iMac. It's very easy to pinch a cable or do something that will come back and bite you.
I mentioned MacSales because buying from a good vendor is just as important as buying a good component. I know MacSales stands behind what they sell, and that's important to me. (I am not connected in any way with MacSales, except being a satisfied customer)

Similar Messages

Can the 128 GB SSD part of a fusion drive be replaced with a 960 GB SSD dive for greater performance and added storage?

Can the 128 GB SSD part of a fusion drive be replaced with a 960 GB SSD dive for greater performance and added storage in a 2012 mac mini?

First, I suspect Apple fine tuned its choice of SSD size for the Fusion drive based on the best performance/price ratio. I'd be surprised if a larger SSD provided any improvement that would justify the added price of a larger SSD.
Second, if I could justify the cost of a 960 SSD drive I wouldn't bother with a Fusion drive!

DIY MAC Fusion Drive

I'd like to create my own MAC Fusion Drive, but I'm not a dev so I need a little bit of guidance, which would also help a lot of people I'm guessing.
I am trying to follow jollyjinx's instructions, which are not that detailed. Specifically, I am trying to find the names of my two drives and I can only find one. Maybe the drives are not connected in a way to do this I'm not sure. I have a 750GB HDD and an 80GB SSD installed internally in my 2011 Mac Mini. I have been using both drives, SSD for the OS and a handful of common files and the HDD for iPhoto and iTunes libraries. A Fusion drive would be perfect!
When I run dmesg in Terminal, here is what I get:
-bash-3.2# dmesg
PMAP: PCID enabled
Darwin Kernel Version 12.1.0: Tue Aug 14 13:29:55 PDT 2012; root:xnu-2050.9.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64
vm_page_bootstrap: 2003271 free pages and 77497 wired pages
kext submap [0xffffff7f8073e000 - 0xffffff8000000000], kernel text [0xffffff8000200000 - 0xffffff800073e000]
zone leak detection enabled
standard timeslicing quantum is 10000 us
standard background quantum is 2500 us
mig_table_max_displ = 74
TSC Deadline Timer supported and enabled
corecrypto kext started!
Running kernel space in FIPS MODE
Plist hmac value is    735d392b68241ef173d81097b1c8ce9ba283521626d1c973ac376838c466757d
Computed hmac value is 735d392b68241ef173d81097b1c8ce9ba283521626d1c973ac376838c466757d
corecrypto.kext FIPS integrity POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS AES CBC POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS TDES CBC POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS AES ECB AESNI POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS AES XTS AESNI POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS SHA POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS HMAC POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS ECDSA POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS DRBG POST test passed!
corecrypto.kext FIPS POST passed!
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=1 LocalApicId=0 Enabled
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=2 LocalApicId=2 Enabled
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=3 LocalApicId=1 Enabled
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=4 LocalApicId=3 Enabled
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=5 LocalApicId=255 Disabled
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=6 LocalApicId=255 Disabled
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=7 LocalApicId=255 Disabled
AppleACPICPU: ProcessorId=8 LocalApicId=255 Disabled
calling mpo_policy_init for TMSafetyNet
Security policy loaded: Safety net for Time Machine (TMSafetyNet)
calling mpo_policy_init for Sandbox
Security policy loaded: Seatbelt sandbox policy (Sandbox)
calling mpo_policy_init for Quarantine
Security policy loaded: Quarantine policy (Quarantine)
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
          The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
MAC Framework successfully initialized
using 16384 buffer headers and 10240 cluster IO buffer headers
IOAPIC: Version 0x20 Vectors 64:87
ACPI: System State [S0 S3 S4 S5] (S3)
PFM64 (36 cpu) 0xf10000000, 0xf0000000
[ PCI configuration begin ]
AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement: Turbo Ratios 0057
AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement: (built 13:47:00 Aug 14 2012) initialization complete
console relocated to 0xf60010000
PCI configuration changed (bridge=16 device=5 cardbus=0)
[ PCI configuration end, bridges 13 devices 18 ]
mbinit: done [96 MB total pool size, (64/32) split]
Pthread support ABORTS when sync kernel primitives misused
rooting via boot-uuid from /chosen: 7B269773-B97B-335A-A4EF-A3D6956395BA
Waiting on <dict ID="0"><key>IOProviderClass</key><string ID="1">IOResources</string><key>IOResourceMatch</key><string ID="2">boot-uuid-media</string></dict>
com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib kmod start
com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless kmod start
com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeZlib load succeeded
com.apple.AppleFSCompressionTypeDataless load succeeded
AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient: ready
BTCOEXIST off
BRCM tunables:
pullmode[1] txringsize[ 256] reapmin[   32] reapcount[ 128]
highWaterMark: VO[ 192] VI[ 192] BE[ 192] BK[ 192]
FireWire (OHCI) TI ID 823f built-in now active, GUID c82a14fffeeaff8c; max speed s800.
USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 1690A44191FF 0x59b 0x370 0x0
USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): AA19164300000896 0x3f0 0xb107 0x8192
Got boot device = IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/EHC1@1D,7/AppleUSBEHCI/U SB FLASH DRIVE@fd133000/IOUSBInterface@0/IOUSBMassStorageClass/IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceNub /IOSCSIPeripheralDeviceType00/IOBlockStorageServices/IOBlockStorageDriver/hp USB Flash Drive Media/IOGUIDPartitionScheme/OS X MOUTNAIN LION INSTALL@2
BSD root: disk4s2, major 1, minor 15
imageboot_setup_new: root image url is file:///BaseSystem.dmg
IOHDIXController: NOTE: administrator is creating non-ejectable disk image
KDIFileBackingStore::_handleStart: initial R/W vn_open returned 30
imageboot_mount_image: root device 0x1000011
HFS: Low Disk: Vol: Mac OS X Base System freeblks: 30158, warninglimit: 30790
Kernel is LP64
ioqueue_depth = 64,   ioscale = 2
Previous Shutdown Cause: 0
[BroadcomBluetoothHCIControllerUSBTransport][start] -- completed
DSMOS has arrived
[IOBluetoothHCIController][staticBluetoothHCIControllerTransportShowsUp] -- Received Bluetooth Controller register service notification
[IOBluetoothHCIController][start] -- completed
BCM5701Enet: Ethernet address c8:2a:14:59:28:c5
AirPort_Brcm4331: Ethernet address 28:cf:da:01:31:fd
IO80211Controller::dataLinkLayerAttachComplete(): adding AppleEFINVRAM notification
IO80211Interface::efiNVRAMPublished():
[IOBluetoothHCIController::setConfigState] calling registerService
AirPort: Link Down on en1. Reason 8 (Disassociated because station leaving).
en1::IO80211Interface::postMessage bssid changed
en1: 802.11d country code set to 'US'.
en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 100 104 108 112 116 120 124 128 132 136 140 149 153 157 161 165
MacAuthEvent en1   Auth result for: 00:23:6c:bf:ae:20 MAC AUTH succeeded
wlEvent: en1 en1 Link UP virtIf = 0
AirPort: Link Up on en1
en1: BSSID changed to 00:23:6c:bf:ae:20
en1::IO80211Interface::postMessage bssid changed
AirPort: RSN handshake complete on en1
[ffffff8018e64c00][BNBTrackpadDevice::init][75.15] init is complete
[ffffff8018e64c00][BNBTrackpadDevice::handleStart][75.15] returning 1
[ffffff8019e85800][AppleMultitouchHIDEventDriver::start] entered
[ffffff8018da6c00][AppleMultitouchDevice::start] entered
MacAuthEvent en1   Auth result for: 00:23:6c:bf:ae:20 MAC AUTH succeeded
MacAuthEvent en1   Auth result for: 00:23:6c:bf:ae:20 Unsolicited Auth
wlEvent: en1 en1 Link UP virtIf = 0
AirPort: RSN handshake complete on en1
wl0: Roamed or switched channel, reason #4, bssid 00:23:6c:bf:ae:20
en1: BSSID changed to 00:23:6c:bf:ae:20
en1::IO80211Interface::postMessage bssid changed
-bash-3.2#
I can only find one reference to a drive in the data, but maybe I'm missing something. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

So far, so good! The article steps worked perfectly. I setup the Fusion Drive and then restored from my Time Machine Backup (from the SSD). I then moved the files over that were on the HDD (which I also backed up on my external drive. Everything seems to be working great! The volume was previously named 80 SSD OS X (to differentiate from the HDD) and it is still named that, although, as you can see from the screenshot, it now has a 576GB capacity (not 750GB, which is what I thought I put in there--my memory is horrendous! lol) ....not a big deal. I consider this a huge success at this point. Thanks again for the article!

Mac reporting only SSD portion of total Fusion Drive

My girlfriend just bought a new 21.5" iMac and I used Migration Assistant to move her old iMac setup to the new iMac. After that processed finished, the iMac is working fine but only shows the ~120GB total size of just the SSD with the available space of approx. 90GB. There's no sign of the 1TB portion of the HDD. Is this a software issue that can be remedied or more likely a bad drive?

This sounds like an unusual issue. If I were you I would contact Apple about it. Her computer is new, so it should still be under the 90 days of free telephone support that Apple provides.
Contact Apple using www.apple.com/support/contact if you are in a country that supports it or call the appropriate phone number on this page. Alternatively carry the iMac in to an Apple retail store.
Best of luck.

DIY Fusion Drive and RAID 5

Hi everyone!
I have spent several hours by reading various forums but haven’t found any definitive answers.
I have a 12 Core Mac Pro with the following setup: one 1TB SATA hard drive that carries the system and applications. For the files and storage there are three 2TB SATA drives in RAID 5 controlled by Apple RAID card. I am going to install a 512 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD drive in the optical bay and have initially planned to use it just for the system and applications, but am curious if the following is possible.
1) Is it possible to combine the RAID 5 array with the SSD and create a Fusion drive?
2) If yes, will it retain all the features of the RAID 5?
3) Should TRIM be enabled?
Thank you in advance!

TRIM directly addresses the shortcomings of having only garbage collection available. SSD controller manufacturers and designers (including SandForce, the controller manufacturer for OWC's SSDs), recommends that TRIM be used with their products. So does Samsung.
For example, here's a 2011 article from OWC describing how you don't need TRIM on their SSDs and how it can in fact hurt performance or reliability.
That article has been discussed here on MacInTouch before. In my opinion it's bad advice, and inaccurate in some of its assertions. It also ignores the recommendation made by SandForce to use TRIM with their SSD controllers. But even if one were to take that article at face value, applying that advice to SSDs other than OWC's makes little sense.
The reason I'm advising against TRIM is simply that it's yet another driver-level modification of the OS, and these always carry potential risk (as all the folks with WD hard drives who lost data can attest to).
Apples and oranges comparison, for a variety of reasons. The short of it is that TRIM is supported natively in all recent versions of OS X. The tools used to enable it for third party SSDs do not add a new kernel extension; they change the setting to allow Apple's native TRIM implementation to be used with SSDs other than those factory installed by Apple.
This shows that the 840s do work slightly better with TRIM than without, but the differences are (in my opinion) trivial, a 9% increase at best.
One of the major reasons for the skepticism that exists about TRIM is that so many people, the authors of both articles you linked to included, don't understand it.
TRIM is not, strictly speaking, a performance-enhancement technology -- though it is plainly obvious that most people think it is.
Though it can, in many circumstances, improve performance, there are also circumstances under which it will provide little or no noticeable benefit. Not coincidentally, a new SSD tested fresh out of the factory packaging is unlikely to show much (if any) benefit. Or rather, TRIM is providing a real benefit for new SSDs, but that benefit doesn't become measurable in terms of benchmark performance testing until every memory cell in the SSD -- including many gigabytes of cells hidden from visibility by the SSD controller -- have been written to at least once. Writing 128 GB of files to an SSD with a nominal capacity of 128 GB won't do it, as there are several gigabytes (exact number varies depending on the model) still unwritten.
Under real-world use conditions, having TRIM disabled means eventually having noticeable write performance degradation due to write amplification. It is far greater than "9%" -- it can be a 50% or greater drop in write performance, depending on various factors. Defining "eventually" is difficult because it depends on how the SSD is used. But given enough time and write cycles, it can happen to all SSDs used without TRIM, no matter how sophisticated their garbage collection algorithms are.
Under those same real-world use conditions, having TRIM enabled means that the SSD should almost never reach a state of having noticeable write performance degradation, as it should almost never get into a state where write amplification is happening.
I will concede that it is possible to design a lab test in such a way as to defeat the benefits provided by TRIM, but such tests do not reflect any real-world usage scenario I can imagine. Furthermore, those same contrived tests would put an un-TRIMmed drive into an equally-addled state even more quickly.
I would suggest reading through the rather lengthy previous discussions about TRIM. Here are a couple of my past posts that are most relevant to the current discussion:
A description of what TRIM is here.
I addressed some of OWC Larry's comments about TRIM use with OWC/SandForce SSDs here.
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/index.html#d09dec2013

Fusion Drive like a 128GB SSD if I don't go over?

Hi everyone!
I have a few questions regarding the Fusion Drive. I bought a refurbished late-2013 iMac for a good price but the Fusion drive is bothering me. I'm planning to do video editing and all my applications that I need fit on the SSD. So my questions are:
1. If I don't go over 128GB (Fusion Drive's SSD portion) am I essentially using a 128GB Flash storage? (I'm planning to edit on external drives)
2. And is there a way to check how much files my SSD portion of the Fusion drive is holding?
3. If I bootcamp my 3TB fusion with 1TB for Windows 7, does the SSD portion get affected when booting up Mac? I'm only using my Windows 7 for gaming.
4. I've heard that Disk Drives get slower as it fills up, is this true? If so, could you elaborate on it please. I may leave the other 2TB remainder alone if that's the case.
5. Lastly, I'm planning to upgrade the 8GB Ram with an extra 16GB Ram from amazon. I just wanted confirmation that these rams do indeed work on my iMac Late-2013 system. http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B008LTBJFW/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&s mid=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB
Thanks!

You are over-complicating using your computer, simply use the Fusion drive as you would any internal HD. There is nothing special you need to do!
As for Boot Camp, simply follow the on-screen instructions in Boot Camp Assistant (Applications - Utilities - Boot Camp Assistant) for installing. In addition you may find the manual for Boot Camp helpful, click http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1583/en_US/boot_camp_install-setup_ 10.7.pdf to view the manual.
As for RAM I would STRONGLY recommend buying RAM from OWC (www.macsales.com) if you are in the USA, if you are outside the US then buy it directly from Crucial, they have an on-screen utility to help you choose the correct RAM for your iMac. The correct RAM from OWC would be found at
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/iMac/2012_27/DDR3L

Damaged Fusion Drives

Hello all, I'm coming to the communities with the sad news that my iMac a few days ago started acting up, upon running a few 'repair disk permissions' tasks, I learnt that there was something unusual as it started showing messages like these:
Open error 5: "Input/output error" on…
and
Open error 1: "Operation not permitted" on…
Around the same time many apps would quit unexpectedly, I was unable to log out, and basically all I did would take an awful long time. Looking up the errors on the internet I learn that they likely had to do with a drive that had gone defective. As I had DIYed a fusion drive myself, I was unable to know which one was going south, so I de-fused them and I've now reinstalled Mavericks on the SSD.
I would appreciate if anyone has a comment to make as to whether you've experienced the same errors as I have and how did you solve them. I also would like to know if there is a utility out there (free, preferently) to put both drives to the test, to be able to confirm if there's something wrong with any or both of them. What surprises me though is this...
My 2010 iMac qualified for a HDD replacement, so the new one has been in for roughly just 6 months. On the other hand, the Crucial-branded SSD has similarly been installed for only 8-9 months. The fact that any or both of them are becoming un-reliable is more than disappointing, really sadenning.
All/any help you provide will be much appreciated.
Jorge...

This diagnostic procedure will query the log for messages that may indicate a system issue. It changes nothing, and therefore will not, in itself, solve your problem.
If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator. I've tested them only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, they may not work as described.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CReq 'GPU |I/O e|find tok|n Cause: -|NVDA\(|timed? ?o' | tail | open -ef
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. Normally the command will produce no output, and the window will be empty. If the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window) has anything in it, post it — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the TextEdit window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.

Fusion drive and external data drives

How does Fusion drive behave if you have data on an external device? I just odered a new Mini and I'm a Logic user with hundreds of GB worth of data on an external RAID 5 exclosure. Will files stored on the RAID be copied to the Fusion Drive when accessed frequently, or will that functionality be strictly for the boot volume?
Thanks!

You can definitely create a Fusion Drive using an external drive to add capacity, and in fact it can be a great thing to do as the SSD will eliminate most of the latency involved.
The SSD will contain whatever the most frequently used blocks are, and these will moved from your HDD(s) onto the SSD to provide the performance improvement. This means you could potentially end up with any number of your working files on the SSD depending upon how often you use them (or have been using them recently). This is important to keep in mind; the SSD in a Fusion Drive is not the cache as a cache-disk, meaning that if the SSD fails you will lose data and have to rebuild your Fusion Drive from backups.
This will essentially eliminate the redundancy advantage of RAID-5, as while you can replace any HDDs that fail as normal, an SSD failure will render the volume unusable.
I'm actually currently interested in whether a RAID-1 of SSDs can be used within a Fusion Drive, as it could allow the SSD part of the Fusion Drive to be given redundancy too, in which case the setup would be safe as it'd be 2x SSDs in RAID-1 + HDDs in RAID-5, giving you one to two disks worth of redundancy. However I suspect it won't work, as I believe Fusion Drive just queries each disk to determine if it is an SSD, and of course an Apple RAID won't identify itself as such.

IMac, Bootcamp, Windows 8.1, Fusion Drive - not working

Hey there,
as many other here I habe problems installing Windows 8.1 on my iMac (late 2013) with a 3TB Fusion Drive.
I'm playing around with that installation about 3 days or so.
Even got a problem where I couldn't delete partition and suddenly got a second logical volume group
Somehow I could fix that.
I tried to install it with the help of Threads which are already opened here but had no success.
I just want a plain Windows version, not on that SSD part of my Fusion Drive, just about 500GB of Windows
And maybe there is a chance without reinstalling Yosemite?
Hopefully you can help me through that process.
And many thanks in advance, here is the output of my disk:
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         121.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *3.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         3.0 TB     disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.1 MB   disk1s4
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD           *3.1 TB     disk2
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2, disk1s2
                                 7FAF6BAA-C32E-4BE8-8378-1AB952103D4B
                                 Unencrypted Fusion Drive
+-- Logical Volume Group 720DDB76-2216-4981-859C-5F2DBC428983
    =========================================================
    Name:         Internal Drive
    Status:       Online
    Size:         3120721960960 B (3.1 TB)
    Free Space:   0 B (0 B)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume D73AC2AF-13EF-456E-915E-8B11D0D99E64
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    0
    |   Disk:     disk0s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     120988852224 B (121.0 GB)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume 84ECF042-B99E-4B7C-B9FC-591B359DD333
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    1
    |   Disk:     disk1s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     2999733108736 B (3.0 TB)
    |
    +-> Logical Volume Family 7734F0C3-28D6-4B35-8F73-8D8675DABDDD
        Encryption Status:       Unlocked
        Encryption Type:         None
        Conversion Status:       NoConversion
        Conversion Direction:    -none-
        Has Encrypted Extents:   No
        Fully Secure:            No
        Passphrase Required:     No
        |
        +-> Logical Volume 7FAF6BAA-C32E-4BE8-8378-1AB952103D4B
            Disk:                  disk2
            Status:                Online
            Size (Total):          3114866704384 B (3.1 TB)
            Conversion Progress:   -none-
            Revertible:            No
            LV Name:               Macintosh HD
            Volume Name:           Macintosh HD
            Content Hint:          Apple_HFS

Hey,
yes there was no Windows Partition as I wanted a clean start
sudo gpt -vv -r show /dev/disk0
Password:
gpt show: /dev/disk0: mediasize=121332826112; sectorsize=512; blocks=236978176
gpt show: /dev/disk0: PMBR at sector 0
gpt show: /dev/disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1
gpt show: /dev/disk0: Sec GPT at sector 236978175
      start       size index contents
          0          1         PMBR
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34          6
         40     409600      1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
     409640 236306352      2 GPT part - 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
236715992     262144      3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
236978136          7
236978143         32         Sec GPT table
236978175          1         Sec GPT header
sudo gpt -vv -r show /dev/disk1
gpt show: /dev/disk1: mediasize=3000592982016; sectorsize=512; blocks=5860533168
gpt show: /dev/disk1: PMBR at sector 0
gpt show: /dev/disk1: Pri GPT at sector 1
gpt show: /dev/disk1: Sec GPT at sector 5860533167
       start        size index contents
           0           1         PMBR
           1           1         Pri GPT header
           2          32         Pri GPT table
          34           6
          40      409600      1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
      409640 4687239264      2 GPT part - 53746F72-6167-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
4687648904     1269760      3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
4688918664        1912
4688920576 1171611648      4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
5860532224         911
5860533135          32         Sec GPT table
5860533167           1         Sec GPT header

What caddy do I need to remove data from a fusion drive?

my MacBook Pro has died due to water damage to the logic board and ssd I have the fusion drive removed and have been told I need a caddy to remove the data and put it on another machine, what am I looking for?

You don't have a Fusion Drive. You should be able to find an enclosure for the SSD at macsales.com and perhaps elsewhere. Of course, if the SSD has been damaged, you won't be able to recover data from it.

Will VMware or Parallels work for a 3TB fusion drive?

I'm in the market for an iMac but I need windows for work-related stuff (and some games)
I have an older macbook pro (13" the first year the 13" went pro, 2009 i think) and I load windows through bootcamp, so no problems there.
I understand that the 3TB fusion drive won't work with bootcamp so my only option seems to be either VMware or Parallels (i haven't used either of these) to load Windows 7.
Just wanted to ask to make sure that there is no limitation with a 3TB fusion drive and VMware or Parallels.
Thanks in advance for any help,
Scott

There are limitations with either choice you make.
With boot camp, that is where you partition the drive to install windows and have a dual boot system, and a fusion drive windows will be installed on the rotating standard drive only. Not utilizing the ssd flash storage at all.
If you go with a virtual machine install of windows in either parallels, vmware fusion or the free vm program virtualbox from oracle the limitation are in the virtual hardware used. Most specifically in the virtual video card all of the virtual machine program use. So if you are using graphic programs the preformance in a vm will be lower then if windows was in it own partition and using the real hardware in the system. On the plus side for a virtaul machine install of windows is that you can run both os x and windows at the same time, windows and the virtaul machine program might be placed on the ssd part of the fusion drive and will actuall run faster then if it was in its own partition on the standard rotating hard drive.

Audio problems Fusion Drive

Okey, i've been surfing TOO MUCH TIME for answers and fixes with the known issues with Audio Interfaces + iMac 2013 Fusion Drive.
C'mon apple, I'm not paying too much money for a lame support. I bought the iMac for audio production and what i found? That I can't use it. And I want the Fusion Drive, so I'm not gonna buy a iMac with 1 TB SSD or 1 TB HD.
So, Apple, who is gonna pay the time that I can't work with audio? How am I suposed to work until you fix this issue that's not fixed yet since MONTHS ago?

Good News: I can confirm that OS X 10.9.2 fixes the issue with the Fusion Drive and MBox Mini (and possibly other USB Audio devices).
My Hardware:
27" iMac, latest version, 3.5 GHz i7
3TB Fusion Drive
8 GB RAM
Drobo 5D hooked up via Thunderbolt
2 24" LED Cinema displays, one directly connected to Thunderbolt, one chained off the Drobo's second Thunderbolt port
MBox Mini connected via USB on Cinema Display that is chained off the Drobo
Logic Pro X 10.0.6
Previous symptoms:
Audio drop outs after a few minutes in all sound related applications
Audio degradation in Logic
Both iTunes and Spotify Apps could (and often) froze machine (no mouse or trackpad or keyboard input until hard restart)
None of these issues occured when switching all audio to go through iMac's built in speakers.
Last night I installed the Mavericks 10.9.2 Combo Update (13C32) available right now only to developers, but you can find it, it's out there.
Everything works just fine now.
Stress test:
Before I went to bed I put a large Spotify playlist on shuffle and repeat, did the same for an iTunes playlist, and looped a 32 track Logic project all at once (yes, this sounded horrible!) and turned the volume down on my MBox Pro. When I woke up and turned the volume up on my MBox Mini, all was still playing through my Event 20/20 speakers. I have worked all day today in Logic and it works great.
I thought I was going to have to send my iMac back for one with just an SSD or perform the Fusion Drive split that people were talking about, but all is well.
Hopefully this update will be released soon for everyone.
Hope this helps. I personally was heartbroken for a couple days as my new machine was pretty much useless and I had already given my awesome early 2011 quad-core MacBook Pro to my brother.
Keep the faith

Fusion Drive als virtuelles Volume ?

Hallo Gemeinschaft
Ich habe dummerweise zuviel rumexperimentiert, als ich meine Recovery-Partition löschen wollte und meine kompletten Laufwerke und Partitionen verwurstet.
Nach einigem hin und her mit 'diskutil' via Terminal habe ich dann alles wieder lauffähig bekommen und konnte/durfte mein OSX neu installieren.
Nun ist aber folgendes passiert:
Wenn ich mein Festplattendienstprogramm öffne, dann wird mir mein Fusion Drive nicht mehr mit der Festplatten-Bezeichnung (wie früher) angezeigt sondern dort steht 'Gesamtes virtuelles Volume'
Das macht mir Angst...
Ebenso bin ich mir nicht sicher, dass meine MacintoshHD als Logische Partition so richtig ist.
Ich hänge hier mal 2 Bilder unten dran.
Hat jemand Ähnliches erlebt? Wenn ja, bekomme ich damit Probleme? Kann ich das vor den Problemen irgendwie retten?
Danke und Gruß - Kai

You can definitely create a Fusion Drive using an external drive to add capacity, and in fact it can be a great thing to do as the SSD will eliminate most of the latency involved.
The SSD will contain whatever the most frequently used blocks are, and these will moved from your HDD(s) onto the SSD to provide the performance improvement. This means you could potentially end up with any number of your working files on the SSD depending upon how often you use them (or have been using them recently). This is important to keep in mind; the SSD in a Fusion Drive is not the cache as a cache-disk, meaning that if the SSD fails you will lose data and have to rebuild your Fusion Drive from backups.
This will essentially eliminate the redundancy advantage of RAID-5, as while you can replace any HDDs that fail as normal, an SSD failure will render the volume unusable.
I'm actually currently interested in whether a RAID-1 of SSDs can be used within a Fusion Drive, as it could allow the SSD part of the Fusion Drive to be given redundancy too, in which case the setup would be safe as it'd be 2x SSDs in RAID-1 + HDDs in RAID-5, giving you one to two disks worth of redundancy. However I suspect it won't work, as I believe Fusion Drive just queries each disk to determine if it is an SSD, and of course an Apple RAID won't identify itself as such.

Fusion drive DIY not using SSD

Hello community,
Recently I have bought a SSD drive for my Mac Mini 2012, in order to make a dual hard drive installation ready to build a DIY Fusion Drive with Disk Utility. Apparently it works well, I have installed Yosemite without any problems and been using the Mac Mini normally. The problem is that it's very slow performance when it needs to read/write from disk, I've got around 40mb/s read and 35mb/s write speeds on BlackMagic disk speed tests.
In addition, checking the installation of the drives running "diskutil list" from command line (which tells me that disk0 is the SSD and disk1 is the HDD), and the disk usage with "iostat disk0 disk1 1" I can see that the OS is not really using disk0 but disk1 for all disk operations.
I noticed that eventually disk0 has movement but 99% activity is in disk1 (HDD). I believe that the normal behavior of a Fusion Drive is using SSD mainly and HDD in second instance for "not-cached" or less used files, but I am experiencing the opposite behavior.
The model of the SSD is Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB.
Please give me any advice about this issue.
Thanks for your help.
Best regards.

Thanks for your replies.
Actually the SSD it's installed in the upper bay, because I've tried to install it at the bottom but Fusion Drive seems not to work, failing disk verification and prompting me to repair disk. In the upper bay seems to work fine, but I've this this issue.
This is my "diskutil cs list" output:
Mac-mini-de-Arturo:~ Bayo$ diskutil cs list
CoreStorage logical volume groups (1 found)
|
+-- Logical Volume Group FB3EEBCC-EBDA-4F7A-9256-0AE4A854C512
    =========================================================
    Name:         Internal Drive
    Status:       Online
    Size:         1239058448384 B (1.2 TB)
    Free Space:   0 B (0 B)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume 3D0A6EE0-51FE-425C-B716-89215472D2D9
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    0
    |   Disk:     disk1s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     239713435648 B (239.7 GB)
    |
    +-< Physical Volume 397E16F1-877B-412B-8D7D-59A5BD47661A
    |   ----------------------------------------------------
    |   Index:    1
    |   Disk:     disk0s2
    |   Status:   Online
    |   Size:     999345012736 B (999.3 GB)
    |
    +-> Logical Volume Family 8FEAC5E2-11F2-4FE7-B980-945A0B81463C
        Encryption Status:       Unlocked
        Encryption Type:         None
        Conversion Status:       NoConversion
        Conversion Direction:    -none-
        Has Encrypted Extents:   No
        Fully Secure:            No
        Passphrase Required:     No
        |
        +-> Logical Volume 1621B9C3-17F9-4ABC-B8FF-767FEF074A94
            Disk:                  disk2
            Status:                Online
            Size (Total):          1230265384960 B (1.2 TB)
            Conversion Progress:   -none-
            Revertible:            No
            LV Name:               Macintosh HD
            Volume Name:           Macintosh HD
            Content Hint:          Apple_HFS
and, for more info, a screenshot of my current speed test with BlackMagic:
Many thanks!

XT750Gb + SATA II 128Gb SSD DIY Fusion Drive setup in Early 2011 MBP

So I have these two drives- a Momentus XT750Gb Hybrid Drive, and a 128GB SSD. I had planned on using them as separate drives, with the 128SSD in the optical bay, but recently I've been reading about Fusion Drives, and I was wondering if anyone had used this configuration in a Macbook Pro. I realize that the hybrid nature of the XT750Gb means that it is optimized for use as a boot drive, but is there any reason why it shouldn't be used as outlined above? I plan on making a clean install, and I realize I'll have to get into terminal, although I'm not overly happy about that- this is not my area of expertise at all-
If anyone has any observations or opinions, I'd be glad to hear them-
I've searched for this particular topic, but nothing specific has come up-
Thank you-
joe

Thank you-
I think SATA II speeds might be adequate for my needs- much faster than the stock HDD, and the OS, Program and file handling capabilities of the Fusion Drive setup might be worth it. I guess I'll just have to try it, see if it works at all...
Of course, the speed gain is important, but perhaps only if long term reliability is maintained-
Thanks again-
j

Best SSD to DIY a Fusion Drive.

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