Fusion Drive (Yes vs No)

bobright said:

First time Mac owner don't do CPU intense heavy stuff, Fusion Drive it is.

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What does one have to do with the other? Fusion drive is to make data transfer faster. For example, I have an SSD in an "older" MBP. It boots up in 20 secs. It launches apps instantly. But it still takes forever to calculate complex Motion graphics.

Siderz said:

It depends; are you exporting the video to the SSD? If so, yes, it will speed it up. But if it's the SSD with the OS/applications, it's not recommended.

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i was thinking having apps, like fcx on the SSD. exporting the video to a hdd...what will the SSD actually do besides opening up FCX faster?

PavelT said:

i was thinking having apps, like fcx on the SSD. exporting the video to a hdd...what will the SSD actually do besides opening up FCX faster?

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SSD will make everything faster... saving files, reading files, copying files, and if its the boot drive, launching apps instantly.

The standard drive for the 21.5 inch iMac 2012 is a 5400 rpm 1 TB drive. I benchmarked it against a Mac mini with the Fusion drive. The Fusion is 5 to 10 times faster doing small random transfers and 3 to 4 times faster doing large sequential transfers. And no waiting for it to spin up.

The only gotcha I see with the Fusion other than unexpected glitches (new tech) is if you transfer more than 128G at one time, thereby overflowing the flash drive's capacity. In that case the speed will drop to that of a normal HDD. I confirmed this in testing. For the average user it is unlikely to experience the drop. Of course a backup scheme is wise.

Hard core users will want a pure SSD. Not a choice for 21.5 inch model unless you crack open the case and install it yourself. But then that type of user probably ordered the 27 inch model or has a Mac Pro with an Accelsior PCIe flash drive. Speaking of which you could connect to an iMac using a Thunderbolt expansion chassis like the Helios.