Tahoe does not support fusion Drives anymore?

hendrik24 wrote:

Yes Fusion is dropped in Tahoe

I just checked the man page for "diskutil" and you are correct. Apple has removed any mention of Fusion drives from the "apfs" section.

I'm not booting from external either.

Fair enough. I see a lot of posts from people trying those kinds of things, so I made an assumption.

I need and want just a Fusion Drive (NVMe+HDD) as a nice single APFS disk with volumes, as a nice hierarchical storage solution on an external storage... like a nice 5-6TB external storage

I'm afraid that idea is dead and buried at this point. It makes sense for certain enterprise configurations. But Apple is really a consumer device company.

Apple recently introduced a new FSKit API for creating custom file systems. Unfortunately, it's extremely limited. It was designed for Apple to play around with ExFAT in user space. It has zero provisions for anything beyond that.

I've been developing some storage management software. I actually have an idea for an archival storage system that could support hierarchical configuration. But I don't know if I'll ever do it. That kind of advanced activity on the Mac is dying fast. That's the nature of the modern world. I can do it. But nobody's going to pay me to do it. So it probably won't get done.

hendrikfromboston wrote:

The question wass not to confirm it (like a AI chat bot) but to rather present options if there are any as the question was: "What other Hierarchical storage options are there"!

If not, then a silence would be more... pronounced than stating the obvious we already know ;(

I didn't know it. And you didn't make any statement other than "it appears". I confirmed it, if only for my own assurances, by comparing man pages.

This is a discussion forum for users of Apple products. AI content is frowned upon. But generally speaking, you can't dictate what people can or can't say as long as it's within the Terms of Use. This is an interesting topic as I've used real hierarchical storage systems before. I was a long time ago and forget what kind it was. It was something that Oracle eventually bought out.

Yes, Apple might be consumer focussed, but that doesn't mean that professionals (not enterprises) do want to us it in ways to make their lives easier, not more cramped in and police-state-controlled as is the route that this is suggesting Apple is taking.

I haven't heard of any masked Apple agents performing no-knock raids on small businesses to confiscate their illicit homemade fusion drives.

It is quite monopolistic in their actions but that is my opinion, as to not allow and remove "easy" options (without making it an announced discontinuation notice) for people that is power users... yes still consumer, but more power than normal users ;(

Apple rarely announced any discontinuations. The few times that they have, they typically do it nine years in advance. Everyone ignores this. Then, nine years later, Apple disables the feature. People get all upset, exchange notes, and figure out which plist they have to hack to re-enable the feature. Then they go back to sleep for 10 months. And then the wailing and gnashing of teeth begins in earnest when Apple actually removes the capability altogether. This has happened multiple times. You can set your clock by it.

Apple's Fusion Drive configuration was only ever intended to support Apple's Fusion Drive. It's wasn't designed for JBOD hierarchical storage systems. There's nothing to stop anyone from developing their own hierarchical storage systems. Well, other than the fact that there's no money in it. From a 3rd party developer's point of view, Apple's doing us a favour by discontinuing the freebie option. But it's really not a good idea for a product. Hierarchical storage has been long-since replaced by cloud storage. In most cases, you can just download the needed files faster than you could load them from tape.

You're correct that there is an "in-between" market of people who can't handle cloud storage and want something better than a NAS. But this is a very tiny market. It's not fun to be in a tiny market. Even on Linux, HFS seems to have been forgotten about.

Hevisko wrote:

It appears that Apple dropped Fusion drive support.... bummer, was great while it lasted ;(

(Seagate FireCuda with NVMe + HDD over ThunderBolt and using APFS "fusion" it was a great fast/hierarchical storage )

Any other solutions to make use of this type of hierarchical storage on macOS going forward?

I don't know if Apple dropped Fusion Drive support. You would have to review Apple's list of supported devices and see if Tahoe supports any machine that originally had a Fusion Drive. But its been a few years, so I doubt it.

Apple hasn't supported external boot drives of any kind for years. Yeah, sometimes you can make it work. But it will always be a fun exercise going back and forth between the command line, Recovery mode, erasing, restoring, repeat. And then random things in the OS won't work when booted from an external.

It's a question of what someone means by "supported". Do you mean full functionality - absolutely not. Hard no.

Or do you mean "some functionality", with no documentation as to what works and what doesn't, with lots of late nights, pain and suffering? Then sure, Tahoe still supports external boot volumes.

The 2020 27” iMac 5K was apparently the last Mac to have a Fusion drive. According to Apple’s Tahoe compatibility list that iMac will run Tahoe. So what does mean for owners of that model iMac?

MacRumors had a discussion about this, that the ones that actually shipped with it, was last shipped in 2019.

Yes, Tahoe is starting to be more aggressive in the non-Intel front.

Yes Fusion is dropped in Tahoe

I'm not booting from external either.

I need and want just a Fusion Drive (NVMe+HDD) as a nice single APFS disk with volumes, as a nice hierarchical storage solution on an external storage... like a nice 5-6TB external storage

The question wass not to confirm it (like a AI chat bot) but to rather present options if there are any as the question was: "What other Hierarchical storage options are there"!

If not, then a silence would be more... pronounced than stating the obvious we already know ;(

Yes, Apple might be consumer focussed, but that doesn't mean that professionals (not enterprises) do want to us it in ways to make their lives easier, not more cramped in and police-state-controlled as is the route that this is suggesting Apple is taking.

It is quite monopolistic in their actions but that is my opinion, as to not allow and remove "easy" options (without making it an announced discontinuation notice) for people that is power users... yes still consumer, but more power than normal users ;(