This was a fun little project I poked around in recently while helping another ACN member with a data recovery project.
Back when Apple started shipping computers with Fusion drives, said Fusion drives were wonderful things. Essentially what they did was pair a 128GB SSD with a 1TB+ rotational hard drive and use CoreStorage to create a LUN that packed the two together and gave you the best of both worlds; a fast drive that held data for immediate use and a slower drive that was substantially larger and fed data to the fast drive. What you ended up with was what appeared to be a 1TB+ hard drive that was somewhat slower than a (greatly more expensive) SSD, but a lot faster than a regular 7200 rpm hard drive.
The trade off was that – at least in the Mac mini – that reduced the number of available drive slots to one, which was frustrating because the prior generation of Mac mini had two drive slots, thus allowing you to make a mirrored RAID of the boot drive. Which was very handy if you were using said Mac mini as a server, which a lot of people were doing. To get around the issue I’d break the Fusion drive into it’s constituent elements – a 128GB SSD and a larger hard drive – and then create a RAID mirror of the two. It wasn’t ideal (because the mirrored RAID would take the size of the lowest element – i.e., you’d only be able to use 128GB out of that 1TB+ hard drive), but if you were really just looking to use the internal drives for boot data and some caching then it was just fine. After all, actual user data would usually sit on a fast external RAID anyway.
Breaking the Fusion drive was pretty straightforward, and worked thus:
• First, boot from an external drive or put the Mac mini in Target Disk Mode, connected to another Mac.
• Second, open the Terminal and plug in diskutil coreStorage list to get a list of all the connected coreStorage volumes.
• Third, make a note of the logical volume group universal unique identifier (or lvgUUID if you don’t want to have to say that all the time). It’s a 32-digit number expressed in five groups, and it looks something like 1234a678-1a23-1b23-1c23-1234567890ab
• Finally, append that lvgUUID to the end of a diskutil command to delete the LUN, thus: diskutil coreStorage delete 1234a678-1a23-1b23-1c23-1234567890ab
Lo and behold, you’d now have a plain, regular, basic SSD and hard drive available for your RAIDing pleasure.
But what if you want to go the other way? If you have a small SSD and a large hard drive and you don’t really want two drives clogging the joint up and would prefer one faster drive? Well, it turns out that rolling your own Fusion drive requires a couple more steps than breaking one, but isn’t that difficult.
• First, get a list of disks connected to your Mac by typing diskutil list
• Choose the disks you want to use for your new Fusion drive. Let’s say they’re /dev/disk1 and /dev/disk2
Note: Exercise caution and take a moment over that last step. Where things go from this point on involve erasing and breaking things in your computer. Make absolutely sure that you’ve chosen the correct disks because otherwise Very Bad Things can happen.
• Type diskutil coresStorage create MyNewFusionDrive /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2
• You’ll be shown another lvgUUID. Make a note of that, as you’ll need it in the next step.
• Use that lvgUUID to create a new volume, stipulating the name, type, and amount of the drive you want to use. For example: diskutil coreStorage createVolume 1234a678-1a23-1b23-1c23-1234567890ab "NewFusionDrive" jhfs+ 100%
…and that’s about it. You should now have a new Fusion drive on your desktop.