He is being captain obvious because he doesn't understand the technical stuff that well (it's in his other articles too). He's trying to fix 1 drive that is part of the Fusion Drive in a completely different Mac. Anyone who knows the technology would not even attempt such a ridiculous thing. It's like taking out 1 disk in a RAID array and rebuilding it on a completely different machine. Or if you have 1 disk in your computer at home: chopping it in half and trying to fix it on your computer at work. Of course it doesn't work. The only additional thing he found and for which we do have to give him some credits is the fact that trying to do something this stupid can result into hosing the data on all the disk in the machine you are using to fix the disk.
Anyway, the OWC article:
They are not as different as the author tries to tell you and which is quite clear from the aforementioned articles from Arstechnica and Jolly. You can not create a Fusion Drive specifically. Period. What you can only do is create a CoreStorage Volume Group. Whether that group will be a Fusion Drive or not is not up to the user because it is OS X that will decide on this. That's also the problem: you get a Fusion Drive (or not) whether you like it or not. OS X will create a Fusion Drive automatically when that volume group contains an ssd and an hdd. If you don't want that then your only option is creating something else then a CoreStorage Volume Group. However, this does not make CoreStorage and CoreStorage Volume Groups the same as Fusion Drive! Those are all different things. Fusion Drive can be defined as a CoreStorage Volume Group consisting of an ssd and an hdd.
The only problem I have with the article is the following:
It's just this. Nothing but a claim the other articles are wrong. No proof that they are, no proof that 10.8.3 does indeed create a real Fusion Drive. We have to believe that the author is correct. It's quite a bold statement when you say (nearly) every article about setting up a Fusion Drive for 10.8.2 is wrong when there are articles that provide iostats when moving around data which shows that the speed changes. The technical information about how Fusion Drive works and the differences between 10.8.2 and 10.8.3 is what the article is about. The only problem: the article doesn't contain such info and thus is completely useless. There is a bold claim the other articles are wrong after which they are copy-pasting the Fusion Drive setup procedure that is in those same articles.
The pudding is in the comments
Somebody has noticed and is asking what the difference is between 10.8.2 and 10.8.3 regarding Fusion Drive. OWV Michael comments on it and it appears they have only tested it with 10.8.1 and 10.8.3. It's a strange comment. I'm wondering if they actually know what they are doing when setting up Fusion Drive. It seems they are misunderstanding some terminology and/or misinterpreting test results. For me the article raises more questions than it answers.
