How To?: install Big Sur (OCLP) on Mac mini 2012 server with 2 SSDs

[adb1973]

Hi. I have a Mac mini 2012 with 2 similar SSD’s inside.

Under Catalina I used Rafal Lesniaks method to make it boot from RAID which worked great and had 1GB/s I/O speeds as a consequence.
Apparently Big Sur broke this option. At least I couldn’t make it work and no one replied to my requests for help (I think with OCLP it can be done)

Because Big Sur has advantages over Catalina I want to move on with OCLP.
What I did so far:
- was fruitless efforts to make it work with RAID, and now:

I combined both drives in a:
2x64GB CoreStorage Volume-128 FusionDrive (with diskutil apfs command not with reset fusion), and a;
2x936GB striped Raidset ‘Data’ made with the original internet recovery diskutil version combining disk0s3 with disk1s3

I’m in the proces of re-installing with OCLP Big Sur 11.6 and:
A-would love to hear what other efforts have been made/if there are better options (faster? More reliable)
B-wonder who else is interested in an optimal Mac mini 2012 ‘server’ configuration, i can’t imagine i’m the only one

 

[Bonari49]

……can you tell us how it went? I’d love to try it

 

[adb1973]

So far I would recommend this. It's still working as intended and I had zero to none crashes/glitches.
I must say I find OCLP on this machine a gift from heaven. The install went flawless, updates too.
The only thing is that I had to dive a bit into was partitioning the SSD's since the newer diskutil just does not allow you to do this properly but older versions do.

 

[Bonari49]

So far I would recommend this. It's still working as intended and I had zero to none crashes/glitches.
I must say I find OCLP on this machine a gift from heaven. The install went flawless, updates too.
The only thing is dat I had to dive a bit into was partitioning the SSD's since the newer diskutil just does not allow you to do this properly but older versions do.

That’s very helpful. Thanks