How to set up a Fusion drive on a Hackintosh

Recently, Apple released the Fusion Drive, a new technology that increases hard disk performance by setting up a 128GB solid state disk and a 1TB normal hard disk to work together as a single virtual drive. By allocating most of the heavy lifting to its solid state portion, the Fusion Drive allows for much faster overall performance while still providing a lot of storage space.

Since the Fusion Drive is a proprietary technology, it's usually unavailable to PCs. However, you can still set up your own Fusion Drive on a Hackintosh. Fusion Drives are set up in an extremely similar way to RAID 0 arrays, an alternative different method for increasing hard disk performance. We've previously covered how to set up a RAID 0 array on your Hackintosh; setting up a Fusion Drive isn't really isn't much harder. Interested? Read on.

How to set up a Hackintosh on RAID 0 in Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks

RAID 0 is a method used to increase hard disk performance, by setting up multiple hard disks to work as a single virtual disk. For instance, if you set up a RAID 0 array to combine two 50 GB hard disks into a single 100GB virtual disk, that single virtual disk will have (roughly) two times faster performance than a normal disk.

Setting up a RAID system on a Hackintosh is very tricky, but it's definitely possible. For starters, there are two basic ways to set up a RAID system: with a hardware controller, or with a software controller. The hardware method offers better performance, but the software method is far more convenient. For this guide, we will show you how to set up a software RAID 0 system on Mac OS X in a Hackintosh.

Multibeast 4.7.0 Update

Today, tonymacx86 and MacMan released version 4.7.0 of Multibeast 4, their post-installation tool for Hackintoshes running Mac OS X Lion. We have updated our comprehensive guide to Multibeast 4 to reflect this update.

Users of Mac OS X Lion rejoice-- though development of Multibeast 4 has languished since the release of Multibeast 5 for Mountain Lion, the 4.7.0 update improves Multibeast 4 dramatically. First and foremast, all of the improvements introduced by Multibeast 5 have finally been pushed to Multibeast 4. Multibeast 4.7.0 now has a greatly simplified section for audio drivers, the old "System Utilities" section has been removed (Multibeast now repairs file permissions by default), several options have been given simpler names, and many options have been updated. In addition, the "Miscellaneous" section has been split into two separate sections, though the actual distinction between these two sections is arguably murky. For full details on the update, jump past the break.