Jim,

yes, more or less. I don’t know what confusion he’s talking about … possibly that some people thought a striped, or concatenated drive is the same as Fusion. Anyway, you do it in Terminal, which seems like a big deal, but it’s really very simple. Takes 5 minutes. 10 minutes if you check everything 3 times before proceeding. :)

NB, Disk Utility in Mavericks knows all about Fusion and reports and repairs them correctly. This wasn’t the case when I made my Fusion about a year ago.

I’ve got a fast Samsung SSD and a standard HDD crammed into my 2009 17” lovingly known as “Lapzilla”. What I do is to store an Aperture Library on my SSD into which I import my active projects. Once I handle the initial sorting and management, I move the project to one of my libraries on the HDD. (“Export as New Library” into temp file onto the HDD, Merge into the main HDD Library, delete the temporary). That way, you get the speed when you need it, and you’re not using up your SSD when you don’t.

Graham,

if you feel brave, then make a Fusion drive out of your 2 drives. I have been running a ‘home-made’ Fusion drive in a 2008 MBPro for almost a year (running beta Mavericks for the last 9 months or so). 256Gb-SSD + 750Gb-7200rmpHD. Mavericks knows all about Fusion and you will never ever know that the hot-swapping is going on. Even individual images in Aperture will be moved onto SSD if you look at them frequently. Works well and honestly, after a week or so of use (Fusion has to move frequently used files around to become effective) your Mac will feel like a new machine. If OTOH, your system + Aperture library can all fit on your 240 SSD, then that will be the fastest.

FWIW, Mavericks is a huge benefit for any apps requiring a lot of RAM. It’s one of the major things that Apple have done. It’s ‘under the hood’ but very very significant. Disk swapping (paging) has been greatly reduced.

Graham,

you know your own working needs better than I do, but for those reading that may not fully understand the implications :

For as long as I can remember, pros have fed their need-for-speed by striping drives together. I’ve striped drives for years and Fusion, whilst not quite the same as a RAID Stripe, has the same weakness in that a drive failure means a total loss. Pros (generally) provide against this scary eventuality by having multiple, reliable and up-to-date backups.

The point here, is that if you’re not already keeping your backups constantly up-to-date, then you’re taking a much bigger risk than you would be by adding striping or using a Fusion. In other words, you already have the backups, so … where’s the risk?

Most people have a single drive in their MacBook Pro. If it fails, you loose everything … except of course, you don’t, because you have backups. Apple have taken this view when developing the Fusion drive format and installing them into iMacs. They see no increased risk.

Some would say that you are doubling the risk of failure, but others might argue, that you are reducing the risk of failure, because each drive is only being used half as much, which reduces wear and tear by half. (This is more true of striping than Fusion).

gfsymon… To create your fusion drive, did you use the technique described in the OWC blog referenced above, or a different approach? I’m interested in doing this as I upgrade to Mavericks. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks.

If you are not worried about the library taking up too much space on the SSD then Yes it would be faster. I have the same 2009 MBP with 8gigs, the SSD and the older HD still there for the library . Cheers dbm