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Hacking Fusion to work on Mac Pro?
- Thread starter Inconsequential
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Maybe: are you sure fusion drive automatically puts new files on the SSD? Or does it wait for some kind of usage pattern?
In any case, I have a simple set-up for importing RAW files. I bought a cheap 32GB SSD just for that purpose (I could use my main SSD, but I personally prefer leaving that drive alone as much as possible). I dump my RAW files there when I plug my camera, then in Bridge I organize the files into folders if I need to, and once I'm done editing the files, I simply move those RAW folders to their appropriate folder on my storage RAID0 (two 2TB Caviar Black).
Since the storage RAW folder is on my Finder side bar, the step you want to have automated takes me exactly 2 seconds to execute. I wouldn't call that a PITA.
Yes it's a manual way of doing it, but I'm always 100% that the files are where they need to be, when I need them to be there.
Loa
Yes. Let's all hope that this works like the first few versions of Time Machine. Can't wait
Anyone that can tell the difference from opening a photo from a SSD/HDD combo and a location that is all SSD is Captain Placebo. I can tell only after my HDD has spun down and has to spin up. After that it is exactly the same. Most operations are still SW bound in open/ close operations. Especially the Finder. There should be very little advantage. Who knows though. All that trouble and my spreadsheet can open so fast now.
Anyone that can tell the difference from opening a photo from a SSD/HDD combo and a location that is all SSD is Captain Placebo. I can tell only after my HDD has spun down and has to spin up. After that it is exactly the same. Most operations are still SW bound in open/ close operations. Especially the Finder. There should be very little advantage. Who knows though. All that trouble and my spreadsheet can open so fast now.
Then you clearly have no idea what SRT and CoreStorage actually are. These two are very very identical in what they do (I'm talking functionality here, not the exact technical implementation of it!). Apple has helped Intel with Thunderbolt because those two are technology partners. It is not unlikely that Intel have helped Apple with expanding CoreStorage technology to do what Intel's SRT does. It also takes use of the hardware part which is in the Intel chipset (to be more precise, it is the rapid storage stuff to create a RAID array that SRT will use).
Or more simply put: Apple used SRT to create their own implementation and put that in CoreStorage (that's where it belongs).
The latter seems more logical: it needs some time to learn your usage pattern. We see this with similar technology where ssd's are used to speed things up (l2arc with zfs for example). It takes some time before the speed will be optimal because it has to learn.
That would mean this thread should be closed because discussing Fusion Drive to work on a Mac Pro is pointless. You need to have the OS X version that supports it. We also have no idea if it really only is software support that you need since Apple doesn't tell us and the Fusion Drive is not available yet. What we are doing here is pure speculation!
Apple has pretty much verified this isn't a hardware or Smart Response in their support documents.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Only your first hard disk partition is mirrored which very strongly implies this is a software solution. Hardware solutions would mirror all partitions on the volume because they'd only be aware of the drive at a block level.
In addition, non-Fusion machines can mount Fusion drives (means good things for the Mac Pro), but they have to be running 10.8.2.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Only your first hard disk partition is mirrored which very strongly implies this is a software solution. Hardware solutions would mirror all partitions on the volume because they'd only be aware of the drive at a block level.
In addition, non-Fusion machines can mount Fusion drives (means good things for the Mac Pro), but they have to be running 10.8.2.
Fusion-drive?
is there something close to what Fusion drive does for those who don't have the latest Intel Macs just released? What is an alternative to Fusion drive?
is there something close to what Fusion drive does for those who don't have the latest Intel Macs just released? What is an alternative to Fusion drive?
Hello,
Well as long as you can boot from 10.8.2, fusion should work if you want to.
On the other hand, and I ask because of your chosen username, there have been Intel Mac Pros for more than 6 years: are you planning on running fusion-like tech on a PowerPC?
Loa
Well as long as you can boot from 10.8.2, fusion should work if you want to.
On the other hand, and I ask because of your chosen username, there have been Intel Mac Pros for more than 6 years: are you planning on running fusion-like tech on a PowerPC?
Loa
Inside the Mac?
1. A SSD drive and just hard code some symlinks to your large files and bulky collection of files. There is no dynamic shifting but
2. A hybrid drive .
Outside the Mac?
1. A DAS box with something like ZFS or some other hybrid RAID system that can leverage SSD devices for caching.
Another example would be one on of the newer Drobo boxes.
Your issue is going to be how to get high throughput connection to the DAS box.
2. It depends upon how public the interface Apple created for telling HFS+ what the geometry is but a "normal" RAID set up should be able to get more traction of it could tell the file system just how 'big' the ratio and size is between its 'fast' tracks and the slowest ones.
I haven't seen any confirmation of that. Some TRIM support is present but it doesn't work for every SSD. OS X may be looking for a proprietary SSD with specific firmware to make this work.
To keep the overhead very low Apple may have hardcoded some aspects of the caching strategy directly into the software that implements this. It may be constructed to deal with random SSD sizes.
For example to keep things simpler and fast most software raid systems can only deal with fixed geometries when composing a virtual volume. Even it the underlying disk sizes mismatch the software will even things out. The more variety the virtualization system has to deal with the higher the overhead. Again ZFS has compose something out of just about anything but the overhead is much higher than plain software RAID. Similarly systems like Synology and Drobo can compose variable configurations but are run on external CPUs.
The "file moving" aspect of this seems to be the already present "hotfile" mechanism in HFS+ being fed better information. Something like "Here's a device, that happens to be virtual, where the fast, outer tracks are much, much faster than the inner tracks... add that to your calculations about where to put files." The next aspect is a apparently fixed size write cache ( according to anandtech article at 4GB).
This second part is one of those "fixed size to simplify" aspects. Pointing to the HFS+ feature reuse aspect and saying it will work for all Macs I think is a leap.
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Apple said they've including a special version of Disk Utility for Fusion machines, so I doubt 10.8.2 is going to allow any Mac to use Fusion out of the box. But it does make me tend to think that if you got the same drivers and version of Disk Utility off a new Mac, and sufficiently hacked any identifiers, you could probably create a Fusion drive.
What hasn't been said thought is anything about BOOTING from a Fusion drive. I'm pretty sure any Mac can probably boot from a Core Storage drive today, but you never know if Apple did anything special to Core Storage.
There is also likely some OS updates to, but they'll be folded into a generic 10.8 update that everyone will get along with the newer disk utility.
File Vault 2 is Core Storage based so you can probably can boot. ( there is a bit of misdirection at boot with File Vault 2 to do password validation that isn't necessary here. )
It really isn't that much different than booting from a software RAID disk set-up. How the data is distributed to disks is a different division, but same basic condition of having a single HFS volume spread over two disks is the same. All they need to do is artificially tag /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi as being an always " hot" file and it is always on the SSD. At that point EFI can use its rudimentary mechanism to grope for and load it from the SSD.
Apple's restrictions on disk partition mapping ( can only have 2 partitions on the HDD component ) are suggestive they are trying to reuse basic boot mechanism already present when have minimal interference.
How a fusion drive volume is installed is the more hand-wavy part right now. Apple's FAQ just states effectively "we do that in the factory and ship it too you".
You mean 10.8.3. Newer hardware will generally have a special patched version of the OS, in this case that would mean a new build of 10.8.2. Mostly the following update (10.8.3 in this case) will support the newer hardware and bring the patches to all the other models as well. Same thing happened with exFAT and the first Core i5/i7 machines.
A usage pattern called writing.
" ... With Fusion Drive enabled, Apple creates a 4GB write buffer on the NAND itself. Any writes that come in to the array hit this 4GB buffer first, which acts as sort of a write cache. Any additional writes cause the buffer to spill over to the hard disk. ... "
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6406/understanding-apples-fusion-drive
You could blow out the cache by dumping a 16GB SDcard to the Fusion Drive. But for more mainstream usage if work follows write it should work well.
Of course it can beat the user. I don't know if Apple's implementation does, but a good implementation will do it easily.
For every file, the OS can easily calculate how much speed is gained every time the file is read, depending on the size. Then it calculates how much space it costs on the SSD drive. And last it calculate how often the file is read. So you copy all those files to the SSD drive that give the most benefit. Small files and files that are used a lot give the greatest benefit. If that composer uses these files a lot, they will be on the SSD drive. If he doesn't use them a lot, then he didn't actually need them in high speed.
And if it takes 10 seconds longer the first time these files are read, how much longer would it have taken that composer to decide which files to move to the SSD drive?
My 16GB flash drive reads at just 16 MB per second. That's a factor four slower than the hard drive anyway.
You get to decide what someone actually needs and doesn't need?
How about 0 seconds?
I'm not a composer, but I do a lot of photography, and I want to have all my RAW files on the SSD. Even the ones I don't use often, because I don't want to have to wait on a slow drive when I actually need them.
So how long does it take me to decide which to put on the SSD? 0 seconds because I put them ALL there.
Simple, no? Why would I have to wait on older files because my Mac decided I didn't need them to be on the SSD?
I think you're missing a critical point here.
Loa
You can't have all photos on SSDs surely? I can't put 1.5TB of photos on an SSD, what a complete waste!!
I have roughly 150GB of RAW files on my SSD, plus some other very old files somewhere else.
But the point isn't quantity or waste: it's that *I* decided which files went where.
None of those files are frequently used: they've all been edited and saved as JPEG. Thing is that when I need to edit a bunch and open 100-200 of them in ACR, I want those operations to go fast. No intelligent solution can know in advance which files I'll need to edit.
Is my solution for everybody? Nope. But I (and lots of others, I'm sure) wouldn't touch the Fusion drive on a Mac Pro. I'd use it as a matter of course on an iMac, unless it would prevent me from using 2 drives (if that's still possible on newly announced iMacs).
Loa
Well, clearly your setup works because you have 10% the library size of me!!
Excellent. This works exactly how I want it to too.
I will be doing this!!!!