Fusion Drive (HD+SSD) and hackintosh: Difference vs mac

[jbesclapez]

Hello,

I have some questions regarding the creation of a Fusion Drive using and SSD and a HD.
I did a bit of reasearch and I have some questions.

Basically you need to create your clover install, and then at the boot you go to the recovery options and with the terminal you do the magic of creating the Fusion. The OS will only see one drive and manage it like a Fusion. Is that correct?

If I do an update of macOS... will it do it easily? I mean like a normal clover update? Or it is more trouble than a "normal" drive?

If you decide to boot from the Bios, which drive should you select then?

So, what is the actual difference on the OS from a real mac fusion drive and the one we make ourself?

Thanks for taking time to answer.

 

[neilhart]

Hello,

I have some questions regarding the creation of a Fusion Drive using and SSD and a HD.
I did a bit of reasearch and I have some questions.

Basically you need to create your clover install, and then at the boot you go to the recovery options and with the terminal you do the magic of creating the Fusion. The OS will only see one drive and manage it like a Fusion. Is that correct?

If I do an update of macOS... will it do it easily? I mean like a normal clover update? Or it is more trouble than a "normal" drive?

If you decide to boot from the Bios, which drive should you select then?

So, what is the actual difference on the OS from a real mac fusion drive and the one we make ourself?

Thanks for taking time to answer.

Sorry that this is a non answer to your questions. Back in 2012 in the ML timeframe, I wrote a guide for generating a Fusion drive set. Back then it seemed to make sense. However with the low cost for fairly large SSDs today, it no longer is a solution in my book. And while I used to run RAID 0 boot drive sets, I no longer bother for the same reason... low cost SSDs.

Good modding,
neil

 

[jbesclapez]

Hi Neil,
What you say makes sense and I fully agree with you. I also agree with you want you say that it is a non answer
You see, I do not feel like spending money again for an SSD. I already have one but it is not big enough (256gb) and I am still considering the Fusion. Now I have an SSD with 2HD on RAID0 for my User folder. I used that architecture for 4 years but I realize now it is too complicated when I do a restore because I have to move the user folder AFTER the account creation...
That is why I am now thinking of the FUSION drive (never really paid attention to it before).
Thanks Neil

Anyone has some answers please?

 

[John-M]

It's the best part of a year later but did you get anywhere with this?

I've just built my first Hackintosh on a budget using a new old-stock H61 motherboard and a still pretty decent Sandy Bridge i7 2600K and installed Sierra 10.12.6. I have a 250 GB WD Blue SSD for the system drive and a 4 TB WD Blue HD that I had intended for my /Users folder but I agree that combining them into a single Fusion drive would make a lot of sense. So, with little to lose because I wrote notes on every step and can start over from scratch if I need to, I'm going to give it a try. Even in late 2017 a 4 TB HD is hugely cheaper than 4 TB of SSDs.

I've already been successful in replacing the optical drive of my MacBook Pro with an SSD and following the guide here so I know what's involved with a real Mac. The advantage of the method shown in that guide is that the Recovery partition is preserved. In the case of my Hackintosh the Recovery partition is on the SSD so I'll try to fuse the SSD's data partition (disk0s2) with the whole of the HD (disk1). I'm not sure if it will work nicely with Clover but we'll see.

 

[John-M]

I did it and it works. I have a 4.24 TB Fusion drive. When I boot the machine I get the usual HFS and Recovery options in Clover but I have to select the HFS option manually. The Recovery option doesn't work. Here's what the System Profiler shows:

Both SSD and HD have EFI partitions. The one used by MultiBeast is the one on the SSD (disk0s1). I think it might be worth copying the contents onto the HD's EFI partition (disk1s1) too.