Guide - Fusion Drive using tonymacx86 Tools & Chimera

[theandy94]

Thank you very much for this guide, neilhart.
I now have a working ivy bridge hackintosh with a 3.12TB Fusion Drive.
I did not install the system on a 3rd drive to create my fusion drive, I just booted with the usb installer opened terminal, created my fusion drive and installed the system on this new drive. After that I booted with the usb stick into the installation, installed everything with multibeast. Then I used your guide for the last few steps, from the bootplist on, and was able to boot with the fusion drive.

 

[seim]

Anyone done this on a dual-booted system with Windows 7? Just curious how the homebrew Fusion Drive shows up on the Windows side.

BootCamp is still working with FusionDrive on a real Mac so I guess (I don't know it exactly since I've no friend or acquaintance who owns one of the newer Macs) that Mac creates an additionally partition on one of the drives (most likely the HDD) outside of the Fusion Array for Windows. I don't think they coded a LVM implementation for Windows. So even if you install Windows it won't get some bite of the Fusion Drive's speed boost.

However I have 2 HDD left over, maybe I'll try how it works with Windows since I still need that thing for some games :>

 

[NimhOfJoy]

Interesting - curious if when you boot into Windows if it appears as one or two drives (or even three, I suppose). Right now, I just have OS X and Win7 on a single 1TB drive, but considering getting a 128GB SSD and a 3TB HDD to FusionDrive (or perhaps getting 2 SSDs, using one for Windows and the current 1TB drive + SSD for OS X... decisions decisions...).

 

[seim]

Well the easiest way would be to ask somebody who has a Fusion Drive to make a screenshot of "diskutil list" and "Start > Execute.. > diskmgmt.msc" in Windows..

If you know somebody..


However.. I'm pretty sure about that and if it's just an additional partition, the biggest problem is to install Windows on a GUID formatted drive (I never got this working at once)

 

[Matthorne]

Thanks Neilhart, You've made it super easy to accomplish and it works great. Thanks again!

 

[Pakalolo]

Great guide. Thank you for this.

 

[ojx]

Thank you very much for this guide, neilhart.
I now have a working ivy bridge hackintosh with a 3.12TB Fusion Drive.
I did not install the system on a 3rd drive to create my fusion drive, I just booted with the usb installer opened terminal, created my fusion drive and installed the system on this new drive. After that I booted with the usb stick into the installation, installed everything with multibeast. Then I used your guide for the last few steps, from the bootplist on, and was able to boot with the fusion drive.

How did you get to boot into the newly installed OS X? Whenever I get into chimera the fusion drive is listed as a blank drive and when I get into it, it just says "Can't find" and goes back into chimera.

 

[the_WB]

Thanks Neil for writing a great tutorial! It's exactly how I did it a few days ago. I started documenting my steps for the benefit of all, but now I won't have to. Thanks again for picking up that ball and running with it.

I'd like to find a way to do it without relying on having an additional drive with 10.8.2. I was able to boot a Unibeast stick and make the Fusion drive from the terminal there, then install OS X onto it, but after it was installed, Unibeast would not boot the Fusion drive for the first time as would be done for a normal drive the first time after a fresh install. If I have some spare time this week, there is one more thing I want to try before I give up on it. I'm not an expert on any of this, so there's probably some vital knowledge I'm lacking here that either makes it simple or makes it impossible.

 

[rightedges]

Thank you so much for the guide! Extremely detail. Now, I have an excuse to upgrade my SSD from 128G to 256G and combine with my 2T. Thanks again.

 

[giffnyc]

Thanks for the guide. I have this working on my old Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P/Q6600 lifehacker build - tony-fyed over the years and currently running ML, but still pretty old hardware.

I have been running on an older mechanical backup and this caught me at the perfect time. My main SSD and mechanical were ready to re-partition as they were currently removed from my system. My install has been running a few months and did not relish a clean install and data/app migration. So I simply added the old mechanical drive and SSD, created the Fusion drive and Super Duper did an excellent job of cloning about 200 gigabyte of assorted junk. Finished making things bootable and am running with no problems.

Boot times have gotten shorter over the past day or two, as have startup times my main apps, a browser and Xcode. I don't have a boot camp partition.

I had been living with two drives, the SSD and a mechanical, in this build and in my Macbook. This seems to eliminate all my peeves and still deliver the main performance boost I want - short boot and rapid startup for frequent apps. My Macbook will get done as soon as I have a solid backup cloned.