The days of HDDs are far from over. I’ve read some doom and gloom pieces swirling the techosphere, however this hasn’t come to fruition. SSD prices haven’t come down far enough to surpass our data storage needs, especially for archival needs. (Actually Magnetic Tape still serves this purpose. Don’t believe me, google it.)
I’ve felt this ever since SSDs started appearing for computers ~10 years ago. Apple also seems (seemed?) to know this, and released their fusion drive technology, which is awesome. However, I’ve always suspected it’s not as good as it could be. 2 years ago, I created my own fusion drive by adding a 1TB Samsung SSD to my iMac that was partitioned into 2 parts.... details can be found here.
Note: The 1TB HDD failed, so I had to repeat the process, and I swapped it out with a 2TB HDD that was fortunately nice and compatible with my iMac. Now I have a 2.5TB Fusion drive + a 500GB BOOT CAMP drive.
...or do I?
I’ve always had this nagging feeling that I may be wasting some precious NAND space, and that the Core Fusion Technology isn’t quite as flexible as I think it can be. Unfortunately, apple’s Core Fusion technology isn’t well documented. Even the legendary Anand from Anandtech couldn’t find a way to measure disk usage on each disk either, except by writing an excessive amount to a clean disk. I didn’t have this luxury.
Now I think I see a limit.
In my naïve youthful haste I didn’t care and upgraded anyway. If I get the performance works who cares.
Finally, after nearly 2 years with TERABYTES of storage at my disposal (Still can’t believe this is real), I just reached 2.19TB of usage. Then I tried to download a movie (20GB file), and disaster. POOF. System just hangs, and it’s exactly at this mark with 300GB available.
Maybe (hopefully?) I’m wrong, but I think this means that Apple’s Core Fusion Technology will only use 200GB of SSD Max. Any more is wasted. It’s a good revelation to have, and should serve as a guide should anyone make their own fusion drive.
On the off chance I’m wrong though, why is my system crashing if I step over 300GB left on my custom Fusion drive?
I’ve felt this ever since SSDs started appearing for computers ~10 years ago. Apple also seems (seemed?) to know this, and released their fusion drive technology, which is awesome. However, I’ve always suspected it’s not as good as it could be. 2 years ago, I created my own fusion drive by adding a 1TB Samsung SSD to my iMac that was partitioned into 2 parts.... details can be found here.
Note: The 1TB HDD failed, so I had to repeat the process, and I swapped it out with a 2TB HDD that was fortunately nice and compatible with my iMac. Now I have a 2.5TB Fusion drive + a 500GB BOOT CAMP drive.
...or do I?
I’ve always had this nagging feeling that I may be wasting some precious NAND space, and that the Core Fusion Technology isn’t quite as flexible as I think it can be. Unfortunately, apple’s Core Fusion technology isn’t well documented. Even the legendary Anand from Anandtech couldn’t find a way to measure disk usage on each disk either, except by writing an excessive amount to a clean disk. I didn’t have this luxury.
Now I think I see a limit.
In my naïve youthful haste I didn’t care and upgraded anyway. If I get the performance works who cares.
Finally, after nearly 2 years with TERABYTES of storage at my disposal (Still can’t believe this is real), I just reached 2.19TB of usage. Then I tried to download a movie (20GB file), and disaster. POOF. System just hangs, and it’s exactly at this mark with 300GB available.
Maybe (hopefully?) I’m wrong, but I think this means that Apple’s Core Fusion Technology will only use 200GB of SSD Max. Any more is wasted. It’s a good revelation to have, and should serve as a guide should anyone make their own fusion drive.
On the off chance I’m wrong though, why is my system crashing if I step over 300GB left on my custom Fusion drive?
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