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Once and for all: Does MacOS Mojave work with Fusion Drives?

liorp

liorp

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 9, 2011
26
4
What's up, ya'll? :cool:

I have a 2017 iMac with a fusion drive. I'm currently still running Sierra on it, because apparently, High Sierra's APFS doesn't support fusion drives. I read that Mojave (10.14) introduces APFS support for fusion drives. Thing is, all I've read about this has been rumors, and the official release notes from Apple don't mention APFS or fusion drives.

My question is: Does APFS and MacOS Mojave actually run well on Macs with fusion drives? Do you have a Mac with a fusion drive and can confirm that everything works and the upgrade process to Mojave was smooth?

Thank You all!

Edit: I've done it! The update has been applied successfully and so far, so good.
 
Last edited:
See my thread "Mojave Install Failure". Mojave is clearly working for a lot of fusion drives but it appears to have destroyed mine to the extent that I cannot even boot from a Time Machine backup. Be very wary!
 
interstella said:
Be very wary!
Click to expand...
Thanks! Really sucks to hear that your fusion drive is ruined. Hopefully you had an offline backup somewhere so your stuff won't be lost forever. I'm curious to see where this thread will go, other people experiences, etc.
 
I have a 3TB Fusion Drive that converted to APFS just fine (it took a while to install Mojave though and go through the process, maybe a little over an hour), if that's what you're asking. Never ran a beta of Mojave and was on the latest updated release of High Sierra not using APFS as it wasn't supported. My computer seems to be running slightly better, less animation hiccups just from the early uses of the OS.
 
Cool Pup said:
I have a 3TB Fusion Drive that converted to APFS just fine. Never ran a beta of Mojave and was on the latest updated release of High Sierra not using APFS as it wasn't supported.
Click to expand...
Interesting. And it looks like you have a 2017 27" iMac just like me (according to your signature). I have a 2TB drive, though. That's cool. Good to know that your update went well. Thanks for the reply :)
 
I think the only fusion drive Mojave won't install or mess it up is the "custom" ones for what I read. If your Fusion drive is the one that came with your Mac I don't think you'll have any problems to install Mojave.

I have a 2015 iMac with 1TB Fusion Drive and it takes around 40-50 min to install Mojave. The installation was very smooth - in fact, the smoothest one I had since El Captain.
 
SoYoung said:
I think the only fusion drive Mojave won't install or mess it up is the "custom" ones for what I read. If your Fusion drive is the one that came with your Mac I don't think you'll have any problems to install Mojave.
Click to expand...
A-ha! Yeah, I remember reading on the forums here that some people were having issues with custom fusion drives in Mojave. Mine is the the one that came with the computer. Thanks for the reply!
 
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Yes, I have a backup and a duplicate of everything on a MacBook but it's still very inconvenient. Taking it to my "local" Apple store for repair takes up a fair bit of a whole day.
 
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Wasn't able to update my 2012 iMac 27" with recreated 5TB fusion drive (after old 3TB drive failed) to Mojave. Had to do a massively long restore.

Not going to retry.
 
liorp said:
What's up, ya'll? :cool:

I have a 2017 iMac with a fusion drive. I'm currently still running Sierra on it, because apparently, High Sierra's APFS doesn't support fusion drives. I read that Mojave (10.14) introduces APFS support for fusion drives. Thing is, all I've read about this has been rumors, and the official release notes from Apple don't mention APFS or fusion drives.

My question is: Does APFS and MacOS Mojave actually run well on Macs with fusion drives? Do you have a Mac with a fusion drive and can confirm that everything works and the upgrade process to Mojave was smooth?

Thank You all!
Click to expand...
I upgraded my 2012 Mini with a Fusion drive to Mojave. No issues at all, and the drive was converted to APFS as expected.
 
I have a late-2013 iMac w/ 3 Tb fusion drive. I'm also using Boot Camp.

The update to Mojave was accomplished with no issues. The MacOS partitions were converted to APFS.
 
Can confirm that it works fine on my 2014 iMac with a 3TB Fusion Drive. No issues. Installation took a bit longer than on my two SSD-equipped MacBooks, presumably because of the conversion to APFS, but I had no issues with it whatsoever. As with everything I highly recommend making backups beforehand just to be sure.
 
liorp said:
What's up, ya'll? :cool:

I have a 2017 iMac with a fusion drive. I'm currently still running Sierra on it, because apparently, High Sierra's APFS doesn't support fusion drives. I read that Mojave (10.14) introduces APFS support for fusion drives. Thing is, all I've read about this has been rumors, and the official release notes from Apple don't mention APFS or fusion drives.

My question is: Does APFS and MacOS Mojave actually run well on Macs with fusion drives? Do you have a Mac with a fusion drive and can confirm that everything works and the upgrade process to Mojave was smooth?

Thank You all!
Click to expand...
[doublepost=1538072284][/doublepost]I had huge problems on release day, no network, no Bluetooth, s l o w as cold mud.
Tried all the resets, reinstall etc. Two hours on with Apple Support.
So been at Apple store since 12:20edt (now 2:16edt). Comeplete erase and install
From TM backup. Takes a while....
 
Thank You all! It's interesting to see mixed answers and different experiences on different machines. Personally, I haven't upgraded yet. Curious to read about more people's experiences, and see what happens when 10.14.1 gets released.
 
Yes it works. My iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015 Custom 3TF Fusion drive) works but I have network freezes which can only be recovered by a re-boot.
 
I don't know if it was related to Mojave or something else, but I have a Fusion drive failure just after installing Mojave AND doing a CCC full backup. Had to go to Recovery mode and erase the drive and copy everything from the CCC backup. Took the whole day and into the night. Ready the next morning and still OK after a couple of days.
 
I have a fusion drive, and get a 69854 disk management error.
It then kernel panics on reboot.

My brother has a fusion drive, and had no problems installing Mojave.
 
tmcnulty1381 said:
[doublepost=1538072284][/doublepost]I had huge problems on release day, no network, no Bluetooth, s l o w as cold mud.
Tried all the resets, reinstall etc. Two hours on with Apple Support.
So been at Apple store since 12:20edt (now 2:16edt). Comeplete erase and install
From TM backup. Takes a while....
Click to expand...

This is my story too. Slower than molasses. No network - ethernet or wifi (missing drivers). I ran back to High Sierra from a Time Machine backup.

Feel terrified about trying that upgrade again.
 
I have a 2015 5K iMac that came stock with a 1TB Fusion Drive. About 3 months ago I removed the 1TB platter and put in a 500GB Crucial SATA SSD that I had sitting around. I then re-married the Fusion Drive using Apple’s support article on it, so I have a 32GB PCIe SSD that is stock, married to a 500GB SATA SSD aftermarket. I installed High Sierra at that time, upgrade to Mojave worked perfectly on release day.

The only issue I’ve had is I cannot create a Boot Camp partition. I called AppleCare and this is a known issue that they are trying to fix. I sent them some diagnostics and they’re supposed to be getting back to me within a few days. We will see.

Mojave otherwise has been fine, though I’d say it’s more of a Mountain Lion than a Snow Leopard. I’m not sure any future release will best Snow Leopard in terms of stability. They should slow down major upgrades, I don’t think we need yearly major upgrades to the OS.
 
interstella said:
See my thread "Mojave Install Failure". Mojave is clearly working for a lot of fusion drives but it appears to have destroyed mine to the extent that I cannot even boot from a Time Machine backup. Be very wary!
Click to expand...

It borked my drive as well and in the same way. Couldn't install Mojave, couldn't restore from Time Machine. After 8 hours on the phone and various chats with Apple support, I erased the drive, reformatted it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive and then was able to restore the Time Machine backup.
 
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My 2014 Mac mini fusion drive got converted automatically to APFS when I upgraded to Mojave. I didn’t notice anything. Had to check the device’s status to discover the conversion.
 
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