But it wouldn't need to be more money, would it?
As mentioned by others, the option of smaller SSDs would have presented a cost-effective alternative to a 1TB HDD and a small SSD.
And being completely realistic here, Apple's prices (in particular for upgrades) have very little to do with the market value of components: the SSD will cost more if Apple wants it to cost more; if they wanted a cheaper SSD price point they would offer it. They are selling Fusion as the best current technology (not sure exactly why) so they will make SSDs more difficult to get. For this reason, I suspect many new iMac owners will get the Fusion drive, but honestly, I suspect most find the idea a little backward today.
What Apple
could have put inside the new iMac:
- 1 SSD only
- 1 SSD + 1 HDD
- 2 2.5" drives (SSDs, combination, or one empty)
What Apple chose for their data-storage solution:
You are misinformed. Apple uses 128Gb SSD + 1 TB HDD, which together amounts to about the same price as the 256 Gb SSD (even without the Apple tax). I still argue that 128Gb SSD + 1 TB is a better choice than a 256 GB SSD for virtually every user - you get much more storage space + SSD speed for things that matter.
Jus think about it: how much data on your disk actually benefits from the SSD speed? Actually, not that much. For stuff which takes most space like music/photos/movies, it usually does not matter whether they are on the SSD or on the HDD (now, cached photo thumbnails should be on the SSD). Automated tiered storage like Fusion operates at
block level, so it will even store often accessible parts of files on the SSD. Now this is something you can't do in a manual setup. What this means, is that there will be almost no distinguishable real life difference between a Fusion drive and a 'pure' SSD. To be honest, I don't see any benefit to choosing a 256 SSD over a 1 TB Fusion - you won't be getting any better performance, but your storage space will be severely crippled. And again, the cost is the same.
I do agree that they should have allowed a 512GB/768GB SSD option for users which absolutely need extreme performance.
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Ugh. Not another "why would you want to..." question.
There are almost certainly reasons to do almost anything, however uncommon those reasons may be. I certainly don't think that I can imagine all conceivable usage scenarios and user-preferences...
In this case, I guess someone who really doesn't use much storage space at all might like to know that everything is on the SSD. Perhaps one could then set up the HD as the time machine disk (though I'd prefer to use an external for that, personally, but again, usage scenarios vary).
Cheerio.
An automated tiered storage will always be on par or faster than a manual setup. BTW, you can still partition the HDD part for time machine (although I would strongly recommend agains using an internal drive to backups)
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2 drives = 2x failure rate
I don't get the failure rate argument. Its true that the probability of data loss is slightly higher with such setup, but its still in the same realm of probability as with only one drive. And if you worry about data loss, you will be doing backups.
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To me, the size really makes little difference; I really don't want files being dynamically moved back and forth between different drives.
By the way, what would happen, if someone was using such technology while booting to an encrypted drive?
1. Why not? What is the principal difference from file parts (blocks) being moved back and forth between platters on the same disk (which happens all the time with OS X).
2. Well, they would successfully boot... the encryption is handled by the volume manager (the same part which manages the Fusion drive) and is completely transparent to the file system.