Only the drive that has Catalina installed will be be split. You'll not see two different volumes from the user space.Īnd even if you managed to have two internal drives installed, there should be only THREE partitions, not FOUR. Fusion Drive or not, a properly installed Catalina will show TWO partitions in Disk Utility, not FOUR.įusion Drive is kernel space magic and file system works on top of Fusion Drive. The Drive container is a property of SSD optimized APFS and came with catalina. Mean while, there are the other 20+ different old Mac models that can support Catalina and ever had option for Fusion Drive.

The only possible model is a modded Mac mini 2012 - you can replace the internal SuperDrive and with a HDD. A split Fusion Drive is the most possible answer to this puzzle, because for most Macs released in the past decade, you just can't DIY add another 'internal' disk.įor the SSD + extra HHD scenario to work, you need a Mac that satisfies these three conditions (1) it's compatible to Catalina and (2) it's pre-2015 while Apple had not yet started to solder SSD on logic board and (3) it has extra slot for HDD. This post is all about weird setup of an old Mac, and the OP wants to know why. Man, nobody is telling that you should use Fusion Drive. Fusion drives are a thing of the past when SSD where expensive. Let’s get into how to identify whether a Mac is a good candidate or not.Man, just leave it be. But, again, not all Macs need to be defragged. There can be a few reasons why a Mac could be slow, but defragging may help. In general, it’s a good idea to defrag Macs or PCs with HDDs about once a month. Defragging also restores unusable capacity by reducing the space wasted between saved data. This unsystematic storage also creates spaces between saved data on the disk that aren’t usable, reducing storage capacity.ĭefragmenting basically reorders the data on the hard disk and bunches those bits together, making it faster and more efficient to access save files. This creates inefficiency, as the mechanical arm accessing a file must move to multiple sectors to collect the various bits of data a computer needs to read and open it. Over time, the data for a saved file becomes fragmented, meaning parts of the file are stored on different sectors of the disk.

Hard disk drives (HDDs) store data on a spinning platter that’s divided into sectors.

On mac hdd to ssd