Fusion Drive Help

[Krypter]

Hi,

I am going to buy the baseline mac mini (new version). I already have a PC for gaming and the more strenuous tasks so the 4GB and processor would probably just suite me just fine for general media consumption for venturing into the mac world.

The only thing is the 5400rpm drive. I moved onto SSD with my PC some time back and vowed never to go back to a spinning drive.

Apple charges £200 for their fusion drive which is outrageous. I have read somewhere that you can boot up from an external HDD and also create your own fusion drive.

But all the articles I have read is about opening them up, or using external drives. I would love to keep the costs to a complete minimum.

Is it possible to create a fusion drive from an internal SSD drive using a sataIII to usb3 cable and to leave the internal SSD drive just left ontop of the mac mini and stuck down with some adheasive so that it doesn't get knocked off?

I want fusion performance/space without opening up the mac the cheapest possible way, thanks.

If you can link to articles too that would be great, been googling all day.

 

[KrisLord]

Normally you can't just go from SATA to USB3 with a simple cable. The external drives have some basic electronics to convert from one protocol to the other. If you can find such a cable then the Mac will just see it as a USB3 device and you can make it into a fusion device. How fast it would actually be I don't know.

It would be easier to replace the internal hard drive with an SSD and then but the mechanical drive in a cheap USB caddy.