Price of 1TB Fusion Drive

majkom said:

And that is the irony - if this is true (that next year classic mb pro will be abandoned) then only desktop class computers will be sold without ssd as standard)) funny, desktop used to be higher performance than portables, but in apples "think different" world, everything is possible

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Yeah it's sad to see. I have always loved my desktop computers, but the power of laptops these days is almost at the point where it's enough for 90%+ consumers so it's no wonder the Desktop market is dissapearing. Can't really blame Apple for that.

I like that they have redesigned the iMac, it at least shows they don't think Desktops are totally dead.

Now if only they would update the Mac Pro and Thunderbolt Display then I would be a happy man.

MoreAwesomeDanU said:

the fact is, hundreds of millions who are going to buy the 21" won't have a clue or care about what 5400RPM even means.

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These people also won't know how increased platter density improves performance either.

I'm waiting for the 21.5" 5400 and fusion benchmarks before I make any real comments.

LachlanH said:

Yeah it's sad to see. I have always loved my desktop computers, but the power of laptops these days is almost at the point where it's enough for 90%+ consumers so it's no wonder the Desktop market is dissapearing. Can't really blame Apple for that.

I like that they have redesigned the iMac, it at least shows they don't think Desktops are totally dead.

Now if only they would update the Mac Pro and Thunderbolt Display then I would be a happy man.

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Well, I think that apple is guilty as charged - if they put SSD as default into its new desktop line, then iMacs would be real beasts - none of portables could event think about being competitive... unfortunately, this is not the situation - they made the bottleneck event thinner with 5400 rpms...

whats all the fuss about. Apple have not done anything different from what they have always done and as apple customers you surely should be used to paying a premium for having something wrapped up and presentated in that unique "apple" way.

you can argue the price point however as a company targeting profits, it makes sense to have a base model that is going to be more then adequet for the majority of users. i.e the 5400 drive
For those who know they will need something faster, £200 for this "fusion drive" isnt really that much to ask. You raise the point that this kind of drive costs half the price and has been around for years, but apple have done it the apple way and made it accessable for everyone, making it so you dont need to know how it works, it just works and benefits you, and that is why we pay a premimum to apple. If your wise enough and clever enough to set it up yourself and your time and effort for a weaker implimentation is worth that extra £100 then great for you go ahead and do it yourself, but theres many of us ( including myself) who wouldnt know where to begin and are happy to pay that £200. ( assuming this is what it is).

Most of this thread seems to be debating the price/justification of fusion etc over standard.

What I'm more interested in knowing is an answer to the title of the thread... is it "worth it" - by that I don't just mean cost, but value...

- what sort of performance increases can I expect?
- What activities will be most improved vs those that won't really have any difference?
- blah blah blah

It is up to the individual to decide whether it is worthwhile for them to spend the £200, and in order to do so we need information on the actual performance benefits gained.

Anyone got any useful stats/links etc?

Pinksteady said:

Most of this thread seems to be debating the price/justification of fusion etc over standard.

What I'm more interested in knowing is an answer to the title of the thread... is it "worth it" - by that I don't just mean cost, but value...

- what sort of performance increases can I expect?
- What activities will be most improved vs those that won't really have any difference?
- blah blah blah

It is up to the individual to decide whether it is worthwhile for them to spend the £200, and in order to do so we need information on the actual performance benefits gained.

Anyone got any useful stats/links etc?

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Fusion vs 5400 HD on Mac Mini

http://youtu.be/d0M6pv9qAH4

beerglass007 said:

I do

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There are three types: Those who know nothing and don't care. Those who know a little bit ("knowing just enough to be dangerous"). And those who actually know.

The iMac has a 2.5" hard drive. There is no 1 TB 7200 rpm hard drive. 1 TB is the largest you can get (except for 15mm high drives). It has the highest data density of all 2.5" drives, and data density is what matters for large files. All the small files, where the bigger latency due to lower rpm hurts you, are not on the hard drive, but on the SSD drive.

So if what you care about is rpm, then avoid the Fusion Drive. If what you care about is real-life speed, this drive is probably the best you can get.

the8thark said:

These people also won't know how increased platter density improves performance either.

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There was a time (before SSD) when some of the speed freaks replaced perfectly fine large 5400 rpm drives with tiny 7200 rpm drives - not knowing that the higher rpm drives where actually slower in real life.

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WordMasterRice said:

You talk about it like hybrid hard drives haven't been around for years doing exactly that. Nothing about this hybrid drive is novel.

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Please go back to all those threads that appeared when Fusion Drive was introduced to see how wrong you are.

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mr.thing said:

Nothing "ace" to me. They are just using the functionality of intel chipset that was available since z68 chipset was introduced. Intel SRT. What is interesting is how did they bypassed the 64gb limmitation of that technology. Could be a custom chipset.

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Article after article has been written about this, and you couldn't be any wronger. Look at the ars technica article for some in-depth information. There is no chipset. And no custom chipset. If you want, you can use the "Fusion Drive" technology with two USB sticks, and it works just fine (obviously not fast, and obviously not very useful, but it works. You can turn two 16 GB USB sticks into a very slow 32 GB Fusion Drive, if you feel like it).

AnalyzeThis said:

Wow! Intelligent drive! A miracle of engineering!
Hm, You can have your fusion drive by installing OSX on SSD and mounting HDD volume/partition under root "/Users" directory as mount point.
A miracle of engineering! Intelligent drive! Wow!

For real Apple??? Really eclipsing Apple history of innovation with this one... Be very, very proud/full of yourselves!

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All these ignorant posts have been debunked over and over in various threads. Why do you have to post another one? What you suggest is _exactly_ what a fusion drive is not. Fusion drives make use of _all_ the expensive space on the SSD drive, they improve access to exactly those files that actually need speed (so of your 200 printer drivers, the 198 that you don't use are on the HD; of the 20 different languages in iTunes 19 are on the HD, the iMovie intro videos move to the HD once you watched them, and the documents that you access are all on the SSD).

kaelell said:

You raise the point that this kind of drive costs half the price and has been around for years

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Huch? Did anyone claim something like this? The Fusion Drive is a tiered storage tech, something that until now was only used in enterprise storage systems and costs an arm and a leg.

Edit: ah, I see, some in this thread have confused it with a hybrid drive... well, its nothing like a hybrid drive

Standard SSD

bmunge said:

The drive does none of that. Mountain Lion is managing that through software that will exist on your machine regardless of whether or not you have a fusion drive. Apple is just doing what they always do and that is milk every last buck out of hardware extras.

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That.

You pay for a "out of the box" SSD drive beeing added to you iMac BTO. The Fusion Drive is OS X functionality. There is no such thing as an "intelligent drive". I like Apple but raising the iMac price and then asking for an extra 250 € / 300 $ for an plain standard SSD is just bad.

5400 RPM Disks is just not acceptable in 2012 hardware.

iSayuSay said:

To make the iMac as a great machine with least bottleneck, one would need:

High end 27" iMac .. $2000.
CPU upgrade to i7 ... $200.
GPU upgrade to 680MX .. Unknown, but I assume it would cost around $200.
1TB Fusion drive .. extra $300.
Total cost: $2700, roughly.

Luckily you can upgrade the RAM yourself for much cheaper alternative.

Clearly, to get a decent and workable machine, for gaming, editing, rendering, $2000 is not enough.

Like I said, it's a half baked machine and way putting the sweet candies just a little bit beyond your reach.
So the cruel fact is, if one going to get a high end 27" .. "might as well" pick those upgrades.

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Half baked? the only thing half baked is you!!!

You ONLY want the machine for GAMING, EDITING, RENDERING? That's all???

I think the top end iMac is a great CONSUMER All in One machine. Probably a couple hundred dollars too expensive but when has Apple ever been cheap.

I think the wait is really starting to get to people.

any-key said:

That.

You pay for a "out of the box" SSD drive beeing added to you iMac BTO. The Fusion Drive is OS X functionality. There is no such thing as an "intelligent drive". I like Apple but raising the iMac price and then asking for an extra 250 € / 300 $ for an plain standard SSD is just bad.

5400 RPM Disks is just not acceptable in 2012 hardware.

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The Fusion Drive functionality is built into 10.8.2. You pay for an SSD drive, for it being set up correctly so that it works out of the box, and for Apple guaranteeing that it works. If you can buy an SSD drive, put it into the computer, and set it up so that it works, and do all that for less money, good on you. 99% of people can't, and half of the remaining 1% value their time higher than the savings.

Now compare what Apple did to what Dell, HP and all the others do: They don't offer a Fusion Drive for any money. Offer them _any_ money, and you can't buy it.

Your statement about 5400 RPM drives just shows that you don't know how hard drives work, and how the Fusion drive works. For the hard drive component of a Fusion Drive, transfer speed matters, and high density drives like the ones in the Fusion Drive have the highest transfer speed.

gnasher729 said:

The Fusion Drive functionality is built into 10.8.2. You pay for an SSD drive, for it being set up correctly so that it works out of the box, and for Apple guaranteeing that it works. If you can buy an SSD drive, put it into the computer, and set it up so that it works, and do all that for less money, good on you. 99% of people can't, and half of the remaining 1% value their time higher than the savings.

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Of course you pay Apple not just for the drive but also for installing it for you. Just saying that asking for an extra 250 € to install a 90€ drive is a bit too much imho.

gnasher729 said:

Now compare what Apple did to what Dell, HP and all the others do: They don't offer a Fusion Drive for any money. Offer them _any_ money, and you can't buy it.

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I wouldn't compare Apple to "any other manufacturer" in this regard because they just dont offer something like the Fusion Drive.

gnasher729 said:

Your statement about 5400 RPM drives just shows that you don't know how hard drives work, and how the Fusion drive works. For the hard drive component of a Fusion Drive, transfer speed matters, and high density drives like the ones in the Fusion Drive have the highest transfer speed.

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Correct me if I am wrong here. I know harddrive performance is more than pure spin speed, data density and few other factors also matter for HDD performance. And certainly current 5400 RPM drives have a much higher performance compared to faster spinning older (low density) drives.

But assuming the iMac will have a current HDD with high density, still a comparable drive with just higher RPM would be faster. Especially in the low end iMac without the Fusion Drive that would be a preferable setup.

But anyway I will wait until iFixit gets on of those awesome new iMac's to see how easy it will be to install an additional 3rd party SSD.

gnasher729 said:

The Fusion Drive functionality is built into 10.8.2. You pay for an SSD drive, for it being set up correctly so that it works out of the box, and for Apple guaranteeing that it works. If you can buy an SSD drive, put it into the computer, and set it up so that it works, and do all that for less money, good on you. 99% of people can't, and half of the remaining 1% value their time higher than the savings.

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what I was trying to say, but you said it better...

MoreAwesomeDanU said:

the fact is, hundreds of millions who are going to buy the 21" won't have a clue or care about what 5400RPM even means.

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And with it being paired to the 128GB of SSD no-one SHOULD care either...

the whole point of the Fusion drive is that the stuff you use most and care about the speed of runs of the SSD, and the other stuff, is also faster to access because as you access one file or launch one program the SSD then caches the rest to the SSD .

5400 means less heat so more reliability in apples notoriously bad thermal management inside those pretty cases, + 128GB SSD means near SSD performance for all but the heaviest of users .

smoking monkey said:

Half baked? the only thing half baked is you!!!

You ONLY want the machine for GAMING, EDITING, RENDERING? That's all???

I think the top end iMac is a great CONSUMER All in One machine. Probably a couple hundred dollars too expensive but when has Apple ever been cheap.

I think the wait is really starting to get to people.

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Average consumers would settle with a basic Macbook Air, or even an iPad. Anyone bold enough to go after a high end 27" iMac is either has too much much money on-hands, or need some serious performer machine for professional purpose. It gets really close to the MacPro demographic.

So yeah that's why for $2000, a standard high end 27" gives you not so much a.k.a half baked to me. Second best CPU, second best GPU, slowish old HDD. If one going to get a serious high end machine, or iMac, like I said, they "might as well" pick those upgrades. And that's a huge rip-off by Apple.