I love the idea of Fusion Drive, but for me -- the propeller-headed geek who does symlink stuff -- I'd like the 768GB SSD + 3TB HDD option to be available in the new iMac.
If all that FUSION tech works as advertised, that would be one awesome machine! Because my only concern with the 128GB SSD + HD Fusion Drive that's going to be available as a BTO, on all but the basic new iMacs, would be that SSD's slow down over time, a well documented fact, and I read somewhere, some months ago that APPLE was working on some software based solution to this problem, something beyond the TRIM option. Can anyone enlighten us about this?
Just had a thought, but I'd love to see apps become "Fusion aware" in the future. (Just like how now some apps take more advantage of multiple cores than they otherwise might.) For example, I'd love to hear that something like Aperture could be made to keep this month's imported photos on the SSD no matter what and then move all others to the HD. Whereas the OS might think "oh, he only edited half of these photos, I'll move the rest to the HD" it would be great if an App could override that and say "nope, he told me keep ALL of this month's photos ready on the SSD for when he needs to work!"
I hear what you're saying, but that would not only basically defeat FUSION's purpose of quietly doing all this magic in the background, without user input, (just like Time Machine Back-ups), but would probably also require a larger SSD. Remember, everything is initially written to the SSD, and then by some usage algorithm, moved over to the HDD, or back again.
Bring the Fusion Drive with SSD & 7200 RPM HD.
According to the APPLE website, the new 27" iMacs with or without FUSION, will be shipped with 7200 rpm HDD's.
According to Lee over at Ars Fusion is a block based tiering set-up, meaning what you are asking for is likely happening. Remember this isnt a caching scheme, this is two hard drives acting as a single volume. OS X already moves files around on your disk based on how frequently theyre accessed. This takes that concept to the next level.
Yes! It's really the best of both worlds. It's (again) a very elegant solution to a common problem, the beauty of which is the fact that all this 'magic' works invisibly in the background, without any settings, configurations or other user input to complicate things.
