Exposing mechanical hard drives in 2020!

[mackemint]

Hello
With the introduction of APFS and the its' prerequisite when installing Catalina and upcoming releases, it appears to me that Apple has deemed that the memory of the mechanical hard drive shall be surpassed to the annals of history.

I've been using Fusion Drives with great pleasure for years and seeing as this new file system not really being meant to be used on a HDD, I'm feeling a little bit befuddled on what to do with my collection of pristine, high-volume drives. Being a cheapskate, I'm not really inclined to invest in NVME and I'd rather use gear I've got lying around that works fine than buying new stuff.

I was surprised to see Buyers Advice section still lists a recommendation for a mechanical hard drive, and I'm wondering how Hackintoshers configure their setups to integrate HDDs into their setups with the least amount of hassle in 2020?

 

[dfritchie]

I boot off SSD but the home folder is kept on a HDD.
HDD still cost less per GB.

 

[phunguss]

Exposing? Yes, that's what you have to do to get to the good parts. I separate the aluminum for recycling, the magnets for projects, and the platters for mirrors. Solar grill !!!

Old 8 foot microwave antenna from the 60s (army surplus). Holds a good 600 degrees F at the focal point.

 

[phunguss]

I'm wondering how Hackintoshers configure their setups to integrate HDDs into their setups with the least amount of hassle in 2020?

I always use a small SSD (less than or equal to 256GB) for the boot drive and apps. Extra storage is always a platter drive (500GB to 3TB)


By the way, the solar cooker was made from dead/failed platter drives.

 

[mackemint]

Nice work! Really impressive build and very nice to see creative re-use of old failed parts =)

I've got a 256GB SATA3 SSD as an APFS boot drive. Moved Documents and Downloads so far to the HDD formatted in HFS+ then made aliases and put those in my user folder of the boot drive.

I did make a crack at creating a fusion drive but couldn't get past the "scanning entries" on reboot after installing.
Read something about mounting the EFI partition of the fusion drive and installing the EFI folder there but couldn't get it to work. My current configuration seems to work fine though.

 

[smoothmove]

NVMe 500GB boot, 1 TB SSD for stuff and 14TB HDD for backup and more stuff.

Also have a 60TB Synology for Plex. Data hoarding is a disease and it is hard to treat.