How to prepare two SSDs after upgrade (merge to fusion drive or not, terminal commands)

fusion-drivehard drivesatassdthunderbolt

I just upgraded the CPU of my 2015 27" Retina iMac and while I was in there I took out the 1TB HDD and replaced it with a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD. Now I'm ready to set it all up, but I'm not sure how to best proceed.

  • I know the SSD will be on a relatively slow SATA III bus
  • I know the blade SSD is 24GB and on a faster bus
  • I know I could use external Thunderbolt for a faster experience (should have considered this but too late)
  • I've read mixed opinion on merging the two SSDs into a fusion drive, but most people suggest against it, since:
    • the speed of both drives will be reduced to the slower of the two
    • if one drive fails I will lose everything

I currently think I should keep them separate and use the 24GB SSD for the OS and use the other SSD for the home folder. Does this seem like a good way to proceed?

I am not sure which file system to use (APFS?)

I am not sure if I should be doing something with TRIM to extend the lifespan of the drives

If anyone can help guide me I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Best Answer

I would recommend to go for the Fusion drive. I am using a Fusion drive with a SSD (128 GB) and a HDD (3 TB) in my iMac for six years now, not a single problem and definitely much faster that a plain HDD. With that experience, I recently bought a new iMac with a 1 TB SSD and added an internal 4 TB Samsung 860 EVO. I combined them to a single Fusion drive (APFS on Mojave) and speed tests show the speed of the NVMExpress bus, which is about four times faster than SATA (with these drives). So far there haven't been any problems.

24 GB is not that much nowadays, and as a separate startup dive, for example, you will run out of space soon. But if you use it as a fast cache for the SDD on SATA, you have 24 GB more space and you can let the OS decide what to put on the faster drive. This will give you some speed advantage.

I would opt for APFS as file system if you use Mojave (10.14) or higher.

Apple has a support document on how to combine two drives to a Fusion drive. According to that document, the simple Terminal command diskutil resetFusion (after booting in recovery mode, of course) should do the trick on Mojave. Unfortunately, this only works if one drive is a HDD. If you want to combine two SSDs, you have to use the following commands (which destroy all the data on your disks!), and it is important to state which drive shall be the main (faster) drive.

Boot into recovery mode (cmd-R) and open Terminal. Look for the names of your drive partitions:

diskutil list

Let's assume the biggest partition on your blade disk is disk0s2, the biggest partition on the SATA SSD is disk1s2:

diskutil apfs createContainer -main disk0s2 -secondary disk1s2

Find out the name of the Fusion container:

diskutil apfs list

Let's assume the name is disk3. So finally create a volume named 'MacSSD' (or whatever) in that container:

diskutil apfs addVolume disk3 APFS MacSSD

Afterwards, you can install macOS again or restore your drive from the backup to the Fusion drive.

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