Apple unveiled the awesome Fusion Drive at its latest event, which combines a traditional hard drive with an SSD to give you optimal performance from a speed and storage point of view.
However Mac developer Patrick Stein has found a way (via MacRumors) to bring the technology to older Macs using some command line code. Word of warning though, this isn’t for the faint hearted.
Stein:
Fusion drive uses a core storage VolumeGroup as can be seen in this Apple support document
Well, let’s try create our own Fusion drive: Attached are a 120GB SSD (disk1) and a 750GB HDD (disk7) to my Mac. I attached the SSD via SATA to be sure that the system could figure out that it’s a SSD via SMART. The HDD is attached via USB. USB I chose to clearly see a difference in speed.
After inputting a whole bunch of commands, Stein tested it to see how it performed, and surprise surprise, it worked just like the official thing. If you’re an Apple developer, this is definitely something you need to try.
While it’s definitely complicated, this really will reap reward. If somebody makes a ‘Fusion Drive Creator’ app, they’ll be in the money. Remember, you heard the app idea here first.
Check out the command line details on his Tumblr here.
