To Partition, or not?

[circatee]

After conversing with others on this forum, a question popped into my head.

With a 1TB fusion drive, that is preconfigured with Mac OS, etc. can one partition that drive?
I was under the impression that doing so would cause issues with the fusion, thus breaking the fusion between the SSD and SATA.

Can anyone shed some light or direction on this?

 

[Weaselboy]

You cannot partition a Fusion drive. What you could do is use Terminal to "break" the Fusion drive, then still in Terminal put the Fusion drive back together using a smaller part of the hard drive, then leave the remaining part of the hard drive available as a separate partition.

So for example, it you had an iMac with a 24GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in Fusion, you could break the Fusion then out it back together as 24GB SSD plus 500GB HDD.... then leave a blank 500GB partition on the HDD.

Unless you have some very specific use case for this though, I can't think why you would want to bother.

 

[maflynn]

Aside from the technical restrictions that Fusion brings to the table, Apple as a matter of philosophy prefers a single partition (aside from bootcamp).

I've kicked around the idea of breaking my Fusion drive, but at the end of the day, I came to the conclusion that I'd be doing a worse job of managing my limited SSD space. The on advantage would be squeezing Windows into the SSD, but with only 128GB of storage, I think running two operating systems on that small amount will be asking for trouble in the long run

 

[Samuelsan2001]

You cannot partition a Fusion drive. What you could do is use Terminal to "break" the Fusion drive, then still in Terminal put the Fusion drive back together using a smaller part of the hard drive, then leave the remaining part of the hard drive available as a separate partition.

So for example, it you had an iMac with a 24GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in Fusion, you could break the Fusion then out it back together as 24GB SSD plus 500GB HDD.... then leave a blank 500GB partition on the HDD.

Unless you have some very specific use case for this though, I can't think why you would want to bother.

Yep that's what I was thinking of in the other thread, you could use it for time machine back ups if you had modest storage needs but if the drive dies you still lose everything!!!!

 

[Weaselboy]

Yep that's what I was thinking of in the other thread, you could use it for time machine back ups if you had modest storage needs but if the drive dies you still lose everything!!!!

Yeah... that is the issue as I see it also. I guess you could use it as a second TM backup destination for some versioning control if that was important to you.

 

[hfg]

You cannot partition a Fusion drive. What you could do is use Terminal to "break" the Fusion drive, then still in Terminal put the Fusion drive back together using a smaller part of the hard drive, then leave the remaining part of the hard drive available as a separate partition.

So for example, it you had an iMac with a 24GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in Fusion, you could break the Fusion then out it back together as 24GB SSD plus 500GB HDD.... then leave a blank 500GB partition on the HDD.

Unless you have some very specific use case for this though, I can't think why you would want to bother.

Correct me if I am wrong ... but I thought you could create one additional partition on a Fusion drive using the Apple BootCamp Assistant tool. The partition will reside on the hard disk only, and will not be part of the Fusion join for speed. Although intended for Windows BootCamp installation, you can of course use the partition as you please. You can use the same tool to revert back to a full size drive.

 

[Weaselboy]

Correct me if I am wrong ... but I thought you could create one additional partition on a Fusion drive using the Apple BootCamp Assistant tool. The partition will reside on the hard disk only, and will not be part of the Fusion join for speed. Although intended for Windows BootCamp installation, you can of course use the partition as you please. You can use the same tool to revert back to a full size drive.

Yep... you can use Bootcamp to make a partition for Windows, but that did not sound like what the OP was after.

 

[circatee]

Brilliant info here, keep 'em coming

To be honest, my initial question about the partitioning was merely curiosity. And, thinking out loud, how to best use 1TB of space. I'm don't hoard data, and don't currently do video editing and such.

My thinking was to have a partition on the 1TB drive. That additional drive would be for Time Machine backups. BUT, wait for it, I'd have an entire clone of the fusion drive, sent to an external SSD, every so many days.

Again, merely thinking out loud here.

 

[mzd]

I'm still a fan of partitions. Case in point: my iMac recently died. Initially it was due to a problem with the hard drive and I had to reformat and restore from Time Machine. That drive was split into two partitions so I was able to directly copy the non-OS partition first. This was helpful since just the 256GB OS partition took 4 hours to restore from Time Machine. I can't imagine how long a full 1 or 2TB drive would take to restore.

 

[maflynn]

I can't imagine how long a full 1 or 2TB drive would take to restore

If you use Carbon Copy Cloner restoring a full drive would probably take a couple of hours. All bets are off on TM however.

There certainly some logic to having a system drive and a data drive, but for simplicity sake Apple has always preferred single drives, which is why you have to jump through hoops to move your home folder to another drive.