He has a couple of follow-up posts too:<p><a href="http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/34694173142/more-on-byo-fusion-drive-i-wanted-to-know-how" rel="nofollow">http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/34694173142/more-on-byo-fus...</a><p><a href="http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/34700977027/fusion-drive-loose-ends-as-hinted-in-my-last" rel="nofollow">http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/34700977027/fusion-drive-lo...</a>
The moment I saw the fusion drive I was hoping I'd be able to get one as an upgrade to my current mac-book pro (still using a hard drive). But one of the big selling points was the automatic switching of commonly used files to the ssd. I couldn't tell from this blog post if the author was able to recreate that functionality (I'm not very knowledgeable about filesystems), but without it, a fusion drive seems significantly less awesome.<p>Just having the OS on the ssd is still a big win, though.<p>edit -- Poor reading comprehension on my part. The new OS X does automatically move files to the ssd. Pretty awesome. Now other world computing needs to start selling them.
Just a quick aside: jollyjinx is the author of JollyFastVNC and ScreenRecycler (among other apps) and apparently knows his way around OS X at a fairly low-level (i.e. under the hood).
To be clear, the author hasn't been able to use a Fusion Drive on an older Mac. He has instead found a way to create something a lot like a fusion drive by combining a consumer SSD and HD, and getting the OS to treat the combination as a single volume. Most impressively, he also was able to use the SSD "first", moving recently used apps and files to this faster drive.
Anyone know if this would also work with an older laptop where you replace the optical drive with a HDD and put an SSD in the hard disk bay? That could breathe some life into my aging late 2008 Macbook 13".
I remember ZFS had fancy things like readzillas, writezillas, logzillas... Sadly, I never had an excuse to play with those.<p>And since the author mentioned ZFS, it's not hard to make another computer pretend to be a Time Capsule or other Apple-approved way to use Time Machine for backups. For me, my TM backups are on a Linux box with a BtrFS volume.
This really makes me want to try out putting DragonFlyBSD on some machine, as its swapcache[1] seems to be quite similar to that (and actually uses a proper FS).<p>1: <a href="http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=swapcache" rel="nofollow">http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=swapcache</a>
I gave up on bookmarks-as-bookmarks everywhere except my phone. I can keep the two hundred or so tabs I need open on modern computers, and that plus search engines and history suggestions takes care of me.<p>With late-loading tabs now standard in Firefox and Chrome, they're really close to bookmarks anyway.
I have to say I'm rather skeptical - the author doesn't say anything about installing the special "late 2012" version of OSX 10.8.2[1] which supposedly contains the functionality. Moreover, as far as I can tell, he's just combined the two drives into a JBOD logical volume (with a total size of the combined drives). So the first 120GB of the volume sit on the SSD, the remainder ends up on the HDD. There's nothing dynamic about it. None of the "benchmarks" seem to disprove this at least, although it's hard to tell until we know how a "real" Fusion Drive behaves.