Chosen Solution
Hi folks! MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012 - 2.9 GHz i7 I’m finally turfing my MacBook’s optical drive for an SSD. It feels like the stock 500GB , 5400 RPM, SATA/300 drive is really the thing holding my system back from another few years of solid use. The thing is, SSD prices have come way down, and I’m getting a 500GB SSD. I’m wondering, is there an advantage to rolling a custom Fusion Drive with the HDD and SSD are the same capacity? Is there a performance advantage over Apple’s software RAID 1 (given that fusion was designed to work with the two different technologies)? I’m also open to other creative suggestions besides just having two different basic volumes.
First let’s review your systems optical drives ability. Here is the OWC Data Doubler spec sheet: Data Doubler for MacBook Pro. What’s important here is the systems clocking. It makes no difference who’s you get as the limitation is within the system not the adapter. In your case OWC notes shows it’s workable! So you should be OK here. As to what to do. A dual HDD/SSD of the same size in a Fusion Drive config doesn’t make sense. A RAID set of two SSD’s would be a better setup. So if you are planning on keeping the HDD you’ll need to keep it as a dual drive setup. Just leave the HD in the orginal bay and put the SSD in the optical drive. Once you prep the SSD go into Startup Disk to alter to boot drive.
I don’t know if you can software RAID 1 with an SSD and a fusion drive. Even though they are the same capacity, it doesn’t mean their sector layout is the same, so RAID1 will either fail or cause problems. You will not get the same performance on a fusion drive than a real SSD. Fusion drive speed improvements occur after it learns what you use the most, then copies those files to its internal SSD.
