Apple's New 'Fusion Drive' Not a Typical Hybrid Drive

[justinfreid]

In my 13" MacBook Pro I currently have a fast SSD in my optical bay and an upgraded 1TB hard drive in the hard drive bay. I've sort of tried to roll my own Fusion Drive by moving things around as necessary.

Any leads on whether the Fusion Drive technology can be applied to configurations without Apple's blessing? Phil Schiller mentioned that the logic was already built into OS X.

[iphoneclassic]

EMC Storage frames have this built in feature for years. This is nothing new but a cheaper way to do it. It is probably two drives one SSD and HDD in one box and OS X can do the swap.

[Aidan5806]

Originally Posted by JesterJJZ

Personally, an SSD boot drive and separate large HD seems more practical. No need to "fuse" them into one volume. Just seems like asking for trouble.

How is that asking for trouble?

[HiRez]

Originally Posted by Rudy69

I'm not too happy with the current price for the fusion upgrade ($250 for the mac mini).

Look at it this way: Apple will charge you $200 to add 48 GB to your iPad flash storage (16 --> 64). OK, maybe that doesn't help :P

[lunarworks]

Originally Posted by shanmugam

most of us do not need that bigger size as main drive, you always need to backup the data into some external drive.

Some of us have a whole ton of music, photos, and other media that we like to be able to access on occasion but don't need the speed of an SSD to do so. This is an ideal middle ground.

[Cory Bauer]

Originally Posted by JesterJJZ

Personally, an SSD boot drive and separate large HD seems more practical. No need to "fuse" them into one volume. Just seems like asking for trouble.

Yeah, with this Fusion thing you're giving up one of the big advantages of SSD; reliability.

[Zandros]

Cache would imply that the data on the SSD is duplicated, and it's not.

That's a silly distinction to make. AMD's processors have used exclusive caches for years, where data is not duplicated across cache levels. I'm not sure why we should have a different definition for caches for secondary storage.

Also, if data is not duplicated, where does the extra 128 GB go? (Honest question.)

[arn]

Originally Posted by lilo777

and most likely that's exactly what it is. It has been available on PCs for a while.

read the article again. seems different

arn

[Cougarcat]

Originally Posted by diamond3

I really hope this feature becomes available to other macs that have an SSD and HDD already installed. Even the previous generation iMacs you could have an SSD and HDD installed by Apple. If they open it up to other computers, I'll look forward to installing it on my Macbook Pro with the dual drives instead of the optical drive.

The only thing that's preventing me from putting an optibay in my MBP is that I don't want to worry about what files are on what drive. If Apple provided an option to "fuse" an SSD and HD in Disk Uitility, I'd run out and buy an SSD for my Hackintosh and an optibay for my MBP in an instant.

I don't think they'll add such an option, though.

[arn]

Originally Posted by Zandros

That's a silly distinction to make. AMD's processors have used exclusive caches for years, where data is not duplicated across cache levels. I'm not sure why we should have a different definition for caches for secondary storage.

Also, if data is not duplicated, where does the extra 128 GB go? (Honest question.)

It sounds like it's not duplicated. You have 128GB extra space. Files are either on the SSD or the HD, not both.

If you have a 1TB mechanical drive paired with the 128GB SSD, you have a 1.12 TB storage platform.

arn

[makingdots]

Originally Posted by praetorian909

Very interesting, though I'm wondering what if one of those drives fail. Is your data retrievable from the other one?

Doesn't matter. We have Time Machine.

[HiRez]

Originally Posted by Cory Bauer

Yeah, with this Fusion thing you're giving up one of the big advantages of SSD; reliability.

Well, it depends what perspective you have, what you're comparing it to. If you compare it to a straight up SSD, sure. If you compare it to a traditional hard disk, no. Hey, it's a hybrid, compromise technology. Yes, you could get a much faster, much more reliable SSD, but you'd also pay many hundreds or even thousands of dollars for it.

[Dwalls90]

Originally Posted by HiRez

The way I see it, this is a variation of what OS X has been using for a long time: moving frequently used files to the faster "hot zone" on the outside of the drive (faster rotational speed). But here, the "hot zone" is a separate flash storage drive instead of being on the same hard disk. But sounds like cool technology. Is it all contained in a single unit? Can it be replaced easily, or as a single unit?

Unfortunately, where I need speed is for my ~150 GB of RAW photos, and it looks like the flash storage component is too small to fully benefit me there. The hard drive on my 2011 iMac is deathly slow, my MacBook Air is WAY faster, despite technically being much lower-specced. That SSD makes all the difference in the world.

Didn't know this, very interesting.

Maybe you could upgrade the 128Gb SSD to a third party 256Gb SSD?

Or Maybe 256Gb will be a BTO I'm assuming ...

Originally Posted by justinfreid

In my 13" MacBook Pro I currently have a fast SSD in my optical bay and an upgraded 1TB hard drive in the hard drive bay. I've sort of tried to roll my own Fusion Drive by moving things around as necessary.

Any leads on whether the Fusion Drive technology can be applied to configurations without Apple's blessing? Phil Schiller mentioned that the logic was already built into OS X.

This is a really great question and I'm curious to know the answer.

I would have to guess, no.

Why?

1.) It's likely a reason they will push you to upgrade to a newer Mac, much how like Siri runs on the iPad 2 and iPhone 4, yet Apple software restricts it.

2.) It may be a mother/logic-board limitation that requires on a controller to maintain this functionality. Likely if such a chip is required, it's not on your mother/logic-board of your MBP, so I doubt it.

But these are both assumptions.

[Rocketman]

How cool is it that a company with almost $1T in capital value can employ Automated Tiered Storage (EMC Storage frames) to all its consumer level users (except lowest end iMacs and Mac-Minis) with over 200m users!

Hi Arn.

[theBB]

How much for the upgrade?

[Avatarshark]

I wonder when will they release a separate Fusion drives for people who want to upgrade their MacBook Pro, well for those people who's hard drive isn't fused (get it) to the motherboard.

[Death-T]

This sounds pretty cool. It would suck if one of the drives failed, but that's why you use Time Machine anyway.

[WardC]

My iMac is already fast as it is, I have an OWC 120GB 6G Solid-State drive to keep my OS X System and all of my Applications, and then on my 1TB internal I store my iTunes music, movies, and photos, video, and media files. It works out perfectly.


I would rather have a dedicated SSD and a separate hard disk, not this "FUSION" deal -- I would like to make sure the SSD is ONLY being used for my system and Applications, which need the extra speed constantly.

[CausticPuppy]

Seems there should eventually be some sort of hack to enable "Fusion" (Automated Tiered Storage) on any mac that has both an SSD and HDD.

[foidulus]

Originally Posted by JesterJJZ

Personally, an SSD boot drive and separate large HD seems more practical. No need to "fuse" them into one volume. Just seems like asking for trouble.

Not from a users perspective. While it's true that the drives form one logical tree(thanks to the underlying OS being a clean UNIX and not that *other* OS that insists on mapping the logical layout to the physical one....) having 2 drives is "mostly" seamless....until you fill up your SSD drive. Trying to explain mount points and why /Users is different than / to a non-techie is probably a futile endeavor, the hybrid drive basically ensures that as long as they don't fill up the hard disk you won't run out of space.

[roland.g]

I would hope that this means anyone with a 2011 iMac factory shipped with a SSD and a HDD would be able to gain this advantage via a software upgrade to Mountain Lion but something tells me that this will not be the case.

[arn]

Originally Posted by foidulus

Not from a users perspective. While it's true that the drives form one logical tree(thanks to the underlying OS being a clean UNIX and not that *other* OS that insists on mapping the logical layout to the physical one....) having 2 drives is "mostly" seamless....until you fill up your SSD drive. Trying to explain mount points and why /Users is different than / to a non-techie is probably a futile endeavor, the hybrid drive basically ensures that as long as they don't fill up the hard disk you won't run out of space.

yep. This is the "buy an SSD + HDD" for the masses who don't know what SSD and HDD stand for, but oh hey - my computer is fast now!

arn

[ohbrilliance]

Originally Posted by lunaoso

I agree. Perfect for now until SSDs drop in price.

The cost of flash memory has already dropped to about $0.66/GB, but Apple is maintaining between $1.95/GB (macs) and $6.25/GB (16 to 32GB iPad) for their SSD prices.

[Lancer]

So does this mean we either have a 1Tb or 3Tb choice on the 27" and no 2Tb option?

[drsmithy]

Originally Posted by Zandros

That's a silly distinction to make. AMD's processors have used exclusive caches for years, where data is not duplicated across cache levels. I'm not sure why we should have a different definition for caches for secondary storage.

The data isn't duplicated across cache levels, but it is a duplicate of data that exists elsewhere on the system (RAM, hard disk, etc).

Also, the data in your CPU caches does not need to be persistent. The same does not apply to the data on your hard disk(s).