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High performance Fusion Drive

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Hello Everyone,

I am using my hackintosh mostly for video and photo editing and was courious about using a Fusion drive for my daily work. The scope was to build a drive with high read/write throughput and high capacity and as cheap as possible.

I have with great success managed to create a Fusion drive using 3x 250GB Samsung EVO 850SSD and 2x 2TB WD NAS Spindle disks with a total capacity of 4.7TB. Performance measured using Black Magic Disk speed utility is ~1400MB/s Read and ~970MB/s Write. This is sufficient performance for me at least :headbang:.

The process:
In Graphical Disk Utility:
1. Create a stripe set of the SSD drives (Virtual Drive 1)
2. Create a stripe set of the Spindle drives (Virtual Drive 2)

In Terminal window:
3. Identify your new virtual drives - "diskutil list"
4. Create a logical volume group using the two virtual drives - "diskutil cs create lvgName device1 (/dev/disk6s0) device2 (/dev/disk7s0)"
5. Take a note of the lvgUUID from the output of the above command
4. Create a Fusion drive using the logical volume above - "diskutil cs createVolume lvgUUID type(jhfs+) name(Fusion) size(100%)"

Please note that the commands above are NOT complete as the process of creating the Fusion drive might varry depending on your hardware configuration. I have put examples in prantesis from my setup.

Also... The new Fusion drive will not be configurable in the graphical "Disk utility". If the drive is selected the program will crash. All other drives will be available for administration.

 
nice work! But why did you built your fusion drive out of 5 physical volumes? Wouldn't it be much safer if you used 2 volumes (say 1 700GB SSD and 1 5GB HDD)? Just wondering ... :confused:
 
nice work! But why did you built your fusion drive out of 5 physical volumes? Wouldn't it be much safer if you used 2 volumes (say 1 700GB SSD and 1 5GB HDD)? Just wondering ... :confused:

I am not playing it safe here. The whole point was to create a high performance (take a note of the read/write performance) volume that could host most of my work on the hackintosh. This eliminates the need to copy data between my machine and my NAS box. Each SSD is only capable of reading/writing around 500MB/s

PS! For safty I am using TimeMachine replicating all the data from the hackintosh (including the Fusion drive) to a NAS (freenas) box as a backup.

Best regards,
John
 
Last edited:
Good question... :)

I am not playing it safe here. The whole point was to create a high performance (take a note of the read/write performance) volume that could host most of my work on the hackintosh. This eliminates the need to copy data between my machine and my NAS box. Each SSD is only capable of reading/writing around 500MB/s

PS! For safty I am using TimeMachine replicating all the data from the hackintosh (including the Fusion drive) to a NAS (freenas) box as a backup.

Best regards,
John
 
Hi Jievensen73.

Im planning on doing the exact same thing but only 2x 500GB and 2x 2TB.
Since its been more then a year you posted this, I'm just curious how its been working.
Any problems? Anything you would do differently?

Best regards,
Patrik
 
Hi Jievensen73.

Im planning on doing the exact same thing but only 2x 500GB and 2x 2TB.
Since its been more then a year you posted this, I'm just curious how its been working.
Any problems? Anything you would do differently?

Best regards,
Patrik

I just gave this a whirl to no avail. It may have worked with prior macOS versions, but not with Mojave. Mojave will try to convert the CS volume to APFS, and it fails. I tried so many different things, but no dice. Let me know if you have any luck!
 
I just gave this a whirl to no avail. It may have worked with prior macOS versions, but not with Mojave. Mojave will try to convert the CS volume to APFS, and it fails. I tried so many different things, but no dice. Let me know if you have any luck!
I did not try the striped SSD. Im currently running a 4,5TB Fusion RAID.

OSX Mojave 10.14.1
2x2TB Striped WD RED
1x SSD Samsung 830 500GB

I have around 350-450MB Write and 500MB read.

I first created a RAID 1 (Striped) with Raid Assistant and the two WD RED.
Then i created a fusion drive of the SSD + the RAID volume.

It works like intended. i don't know how long it will work but at least i can edit 4K without problems now. FCPX keeps filling the 500GB pretty fast with proxy files and stuff.
 
I did not try the striped SSD. Im currently running a 4,5TB Fusion RAID.

OSX Mojave 10.14.1
2x2TB Striped WD RED
1x SSD Samsung 830 500GB

I have around 350-450MB Write and 500MB read.

I first created a RAID 1 (Striped) with Raid Assistant and the two WD RED.
Then i created a fusion drive of the SSD + the RAID volume.

It works like intended. i don't know how long it will work but at least i can edit 4K without problems now. FCPX keeps filling the 500GB pretty fast with proxy files and stuff.

Was it a fresh Mojave install? Did the installer convert the fusion drive to APFS?
 
The fusion drive is not the main drive. And it's a HFS+. I already updated to Mojave when creating the fusion drive.

Ah, makes sense now! What kind of read/write speeds are you getting?
 
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