There was some crazy deep level conflict that meant the Mac just wouldn’t run properly! I rang Apple support and they talked me through splitting and re-makign the fusion drive but it was still unstable. Crashing halfway through installing OS X. So what didn’t work? Well the computer was completely unstable.
IMAC FUSION DRIVE VS SSD BENCHMARK FREE
They had plenty of free space so this makes sense. Not only is the Fusion drive as fast as the Internal SSD (which is what I would expect), it’s actually FASTER!!! The fusion drive must be reading and writing from BOTH drives simultaneously. This is the original internal SSD from the new Mac Mini: Internal SSDĮxternal Samsung T5 SSD Fusion drive made with Internal SSD and External SSD.
The Internal Mac Mini SSD drive speed was 2500MB/s. This gives the Fusion Drive a recovery partition and everything ready to go.
IMAC FUSION DRIVE VS SSD BENCHMARK INSTALL
Then you need to create the drive volume:ĭiskutil cs createVolume logicalvolumegroup jhfs+ Macintosh\ HD 100%Īfter that you just format the drive as APFS, and install OSX. Then you combine both drives into one substituting the numbers that you found above :ĭiskutil coreStorage create FUSION /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2 In summary, firstly you need to run this command below to find out the names of your drives: The instructions are here:Įverything You Need to Create Your Own Fusion Drive The Fusion Drive is blank so you then need to reinstall OS X onto it. I plugged in my Samsung T5 drive and combined with the internal SSD drive of the Mac Mini to form a new Fusion Drive. Making a Fusion Drive.įirstly I had to boot from the internet recovery partition. So imagine being able to make an Fusion drive with a fast and a slow SSD. Then files are copied between the SSD and the slower drive in the background. A fusion drive was designed by Apple to ‘fuse’ an SSD drive to a slower spinning drive to ‘speed it up.’ The writes are done to the SSD, and the most used files are kept on the SSD. It is so significant that this would be an ideal situation to make a fusion drive. The new Mac Minis are much faster, but I was interested in the speed difference between the internal SSD and external SSD. Here are the read speeds of various drive configurations measured with Black Magic disk test: It didn’t work! But I thought I ‘d write a post in case anyone else has the same idea. So I thought it might be an option to buy a Mac Mini with a small internal drive (256GB) and add an external SSD drive and combine them into a fusion drive. But these drives are super super expensive. I measured read times of 2500MB/s which is 5 times faster than the SSD drive in my old mac mini. The new Mac Minis have super fast SSD Drives.