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bayswater wrote:

Tobor wrote:The local Mac expert said he could configure the new EVO 850 drive to make my current 2T boot drive function as a fusion drive, probably a good idea?

Did he/she give a reason to do that?

It's been awhile since we spoke, but I shall ask him soon.....been putting the installation off as everything is working well and I've been out of town most of the month.

He generally is on top of all things Mac and knows his stuff. There have been a couple times I've disagreed with his chosen path after my own research, like information gleaned from this forum.

A fusion drive is a regular HDD with a huge solid-state cache where the data you access the most ends up residing. So the stuff you use most comes at you at SSD speeds, the rest of it at regular HDD speeds.

So you can't "configure" an SSD as a fusion drive, because the hardware isn't there... unless he's got some loco scheme for forcing the Mac to see an SSD and an HDD as one drive.

And since fusion performance is inferior to SSD performance, why would you even want to? If you want 2Tb on one drive, I'd bite the bullet and pay the six bills for a 2Tb SSD. (In fact, I just did.)

Gravity Jim wrote:So you can't "configure" an SSD as a fusion drive, because the hardware isn't there... unless he's got some loco scheme for forcing the Mac to see an SSD and an HDD as one drive.

Actually, the scheme es no loco amigo; it's quite easy do and, in some circumstances, an ideal approach. You must work within Terminal to set it up, but any SSD and HD pair should work. Instructions can be found via Google. I combined a 128gb SSD with an HD in my laptop and it works quite well. All my data is readily available, and the stuff used regularly is delivered super quick. With a Fusion Drive setup, enabling Trim (also in Terminal, assuming running El Cap or Sierra) is essential, as data on the SSD is shuffled constantly and Trim will allow garbage collection to function efficiently. Also, backup becomes even more important, because all data will be lost if either the SSD or HD fails.

The above stated, whether a fusion drive is a good idea for audio is something I've not cared to experiment with. My studio machine is all SSD.

Any app where the data is streaming will slow down to the HHD speed after a short time -- it's not bad. Boot up will be wicked fast, though.

Back when SSDs were quite expensive, fusion drives made more sense. Now that you can get a 2T SSD for under $600, not something I recommend anymore. That an iMac runs much cooler and uses less energy once you remove the HHD is ... uh ... icing on the cake

It only seems loco to me, HC. That's a lot of hardware and a real trip around the barn to create a whole that's about half as good as it's components.

Not to mention Mike Halloran's point. I had this crazy idea that I'd never need a drive bigger than 1Tb for samples. Ha! Well, I filled up that drive, so I replaced it with a 2Tb Crucial drive for $550. When I started doing this stuff, nobody outside a computer lab had even heard of a terabyte!

Then I shifted all the drives down (I'm all SSD and internal in my cheesegrater MacPro, too), and sold the smallest one on CL. So it's not like upsizing one drive... I got to upsize all of them.

I feel your pain. I just upgraded my 500G samples drive to 2T yesterday. 4T is available but way more than I want to spend—or need to... yet.

A fusion drive using a 6T or 8T WD Red and a 500G SSD will work but any large file transfer or stream will slow things down to the HHD.

I've put a couple of 6T Reds in my pancake Time Capsules. I back up 6 Macs in addition to mine around here. They are the wrong shape for my tower so it still has the 3T grive it came with so my iMac doesn't back up to it. The tower supports 802.11ac wireless so it's the only one where I have that enabled.

Gravity Jim wrote:It only seems loco to me, HC. That's a lot of hardware and a real trip around the barn to create a whole that's about half as good as it's components.

Notice he said he was not using this for audio work, but in a laptop that I presume is day-to-day. What is loco or not loco sort of depends on what you're planning to use your Mac for.

So I decided I should grab and run the combo updater for 10.12.5 as my new computer shipped with 10.12.4 and I used the App Store to do the 10.12.5 update a few days ago.

When I try to launch the DMG, it says "this software is not supported on your system".

I also remember this being the case with my old 2010 MacPro, and I always had to get a USB flash drive from my I.T. department at work to do the more recent macOS updates.