Once you’re in, open Terminal and get a listing of your disks and volumes. ![]() You need to boot into a separate drive because you’ll be deleting your internal drives entirely, including the boot and recovery partitions. How to split your Fusion Driveįirst and foremost, did you backup your computer? If you did, go ahead and create a bootable drive using Apple’s instructions, then boot into it by pressing the Option key as soon as your Mac restarts and holding it down until you see the Apple logo. For example, if you’ve got a 3TB drive and you’re at about 50-60% usage (and you should be at that threshold or lower on any hard drive), then you should figure on 4-5 hours for either of the two scenarios. The number of Terminal commands that you have to run for either scenario is minimal, and the time involved has to do mostly with backing up your computer, waiting for the OS to reinstall and for your data to be restored from backup. I’ll present both scenarios here and you can decide what to do for yourself. Actually, some things may run slower than before, and you’ll also have to deal with a few inconveniences, as detailed below. If you’re currently running Fusion Drive on your Mac, keep doing that, you won’t see any significant performance improvements if you split it. The long and the short of it is that it’s not worth it to split your Mac’s Fusion Drive. I love this technology, because it offers significant performance improvements for a fraction of the cost of buying a large SSD, which used to be be quite expensive a few years ago. I’ve been using Fusion Drive since it came out, retrofitting my iMac at the time with a new blade SSD and thus making it run faster than its original specs. As a result, you enjoy shorter startup times and - as the system learns how you work - faster application launches and quicker file access.” Apple writes: “Presented as a single volume on your Mac, Fusion Drive automatically and dynamically moves frequently used files to flash storage for quicker access, while infrequently used items move to the high-capacity hard disk. ![]() The protocols that govern the data I/O are called Core Storage. For the sake of experimentation and learning something new, I decided to tinker with my iMac and see if I could squeeze out some extra speed.įor those who are wondering what I’m talking about, Fusion Drive is an Apple technology built into macOS that creates what is essentially a hybrid drive, by combining an SSD module (NAND flash) with a traditional HDD (platter drive) and presenting the two as a single volume to the user. ![]() The idea is to install the OS and select files and folders on the SSD, with the bulk of the files on the HDD. During that upgrade process, I wondered whether splitting my Mac’s Fusion Drive would result in better performance, but decided against it for simplicity’s sake.Įven though I decided against splitting my Fusion Drive at that time, I read articles that advocated for it and suggested even better performance was to be had by allowing the SSD and HDD to run as separate volumes. In a recent post, I wrote about upgrading the original (failing) blade SSD in my iMac to a bigger and faster NVMe module.
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