i7 or Fusion Drive

[jemmi]

Okay ready to order my iMac but can't decide if i want the i7 or the Fusion Drive. Thinking about the 3.4 i7 model without Fusion or the 3.2 model i5 with the fusion. I really don't want to spend what it would cost for both. I run a few music programs for recording, etc and usually have tons of safari windows open and others apps at the same time. Any thoughts? Thanks

[large farva]

Originally Posted by jemmi

Okay ready to order my iMac but can't decide if i want the i7 or the Fusion Drive. Thinking about the 3.4 i7 model without Fusion or the 3.2 model i5 with the fusion. I really don't want to spend what it would cost for both. I run a few music programs for recording, etc and usually have tons of safari windows open and others apps at the same time. Any thoughts? Thanks

I've been seeing more and more stuff pop up about the Fusion Drives, either causing problems with Bootcamp, or some other stuff. Now that some people have had theirs for a while, and I'm assuming long enough for the 128GB of SSD to fill up, and to where the computer has to now start actively swaping files back and forth. Though I'm not a Fusion Drive expert by any means. I still don't trust the tech yet. I ordered my 27" iMac with the 3.4GHz i7, 1TB 7200rpm HDD, 8GB of RAM, GTX 680MX GPU.

[entrywounds]

My opinion is to go with the better hardware now and upgrade to the fusion drive later if you think you need it. Much cheaper to buy a small SSD to make a fusion drive than buy a new processor. Plus installation would be much easier on a SSD than processor.

[The Robot Cow]

I'd go with the fusion drive, I don't think there's too much of a noticeable difference with the quad core i5s that are also included and the i7.

[rnb2]

Fusion Drive, hands down. I went from a 2009 i7 2.8GHz 27" to a 2012 i5 2.9GHz 21.5" (I knew the latter would probably be faster for most things I do on a regular basis), and the i5 should be fine for just about anybody who isn't encoding video or rendering 3D animation on a regular basis. Fusion Drive makes the machine run more smoothly all day, every day.

[nuckinfutz]

Fusion Drive


The hard drive is by far the slowest component in the iMacs now that the optical is gone. Moving to an i7 may help in some intensive apps but nothing is going to give you an overall system boost like adding SSD to your setup.

[drambuie]

In performance gain, the fusion drive is the biggest bang for the buck. The good thing about the fusion drive is that you're not permanently stuck with it. If, for some reason, the fusion concept becomes problematical, it only takes a single command to break it into two separate drives. Then you could have the SSD dedicated the the OS, apps, and process workspace, with data storage on the HDD. Depending on one's OS X requirements, it could even be possible to put a bootcamp partition on the SSD for Win 7 or 8.

[Nuke61]

Fusion... I'm waiting for my work situation to stabilize before getting a new iMac, but even with my old iMac the upgrade to running an OWC 6G SSD on Firewire has given it new life. The difference between SSD and a spinning disk is huge, much larger than the small difference in i5 to i7.

The question to ask though, is, do you ROUTINELY do stuff that would really pound on the CPU? If not, the Fusion drive, no question.

[itsamacthing]

Read more about the Fusion drive. It's getting great reviews. And the 128GB doesn't "fill up" ... the OS actively moves data on and off it based on your needs, leaving free space for active work. On the other hand, if you are working with files that are larger 100GB, you will benefit from also have a 1TB SSD External Disk connected via Thunderbolt or USB3. There are plenty of threads on here about that discussion if you take your time to look around, you can join a good discussion

[Chris Blount]

Don't listen to the critics. The Fusion drive all the way. The iMac flies at supersonic speeds. Big, big, big difference in performance compared to just having a regular hard drive.

[jemmi]

Thanks everybody, lots of great info! Im going to read up some more on the Fusion drive it sounds like a good choice if the problems so far have been minimum. I also didn't know you could upgrade the hdd on the new iMac i thought you could only upgrade the memory. I don't run anything too intensive at the moment but i do want this computer to last a long time. Im sure with new OS' coming out over the next few years that maybe the i5 wont be able to handle the software of tomorrow. im just not sure yet, I will definitely look around the forums for some more answers but you folks have given me a lot to think about. Thank you all!

[phoenixsan]

lean towards the Fusion drive in your case. The Fusion drive can be useful in files you access often. No so willing to pay extra for the processor if you dont really need it/run intensive apps.....

[ImaWizard]

Originally Posted by Nuke61

The question to ask though, is, do you ROUTINELY do stuff that would really pound on the CPU? If not, the Fusion drive, no question.

They speak truth.

[G-Mo]

Originally Posted by entrywounds

My opinion is to go with the better hardware now and upgrade to the fusion drive later if you think you need it. Much cheaper to buy a small SSD to make a fusion drive than buy a new processor. Plus installation would be much easier on a SSD than processor.

You can't just buy ANY SSD to put in to the iMac?!!? They use the same proprietary flash stick memory that the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina use... To but the SSD after the fact is stupid expensive. Aftermarket drive installation in these iMacs is also a real pain!

[chevalier433]

Originally Posted by jemmi

Okay ready to order my iMac but can't decide if i want the i7 or the Fusion Drive. Thinking about the 3.4 i7 model without Fusion or the 3.2 model i5 with the fusion. I really don't want to spend what it would cost for both. I run a few music programs for recording, etc and usually have tons of safari windows open and others apps at the same time. Any thoughts? Thanks

You will never use the power and hypertheading of i7.This CPU is for photo,video and serious audio editors so spent the money for a fusion you cannot add yourself later without the danger brick your precious mac

[rjs2]

+1 for the fusion

[oililymad]

and another for the fusion.

[Adam-]

I just got my 3.2 i5 with fusion and am so happy, I asked whether I should get the i7 but I don't use program's that need hyper threading and the fusion drive speeds up everything that I use it for, start up, program's open nearly instantly, less than one bounce. Just my 2p

[Mike in Kansas]

I just paired my after-market internal 240GB SSD and external 2TB FW800 HDD to make a FusionDrive setup for my early 2008 iMac. I was running them as separate drives for about a year - my Application, OS, Library, etc. on the internal SSD, and my Home folder on my external FW800 HDD. In my case, the home-made Fusion Drive is actually faster than my previous setup of having separate SSD and HDD, as many frequently-accessed files (and I can only imagine things like caches, mail files, etc. as well) were on the external HDD and it slowed down my applications. Once I created the FusionDrive, reinstalled the OS and copied over my apps, settings, files, etc., I launched some of my more frequently-used applications. They noticeably sped up after launching them a few times - I could even see the individual disk activity in iStat Menus, and was able to confirm that after launching these apps a few times the SSD activity increased and the HDD activity decreased, indicating that key files/blocks associated with these programs.

If you would have asked me a couple of months ago if a FusionDrive had any place in my split-disk setup, I would have said "no" for sure. I was sure that I had things optimized by keeping the OS on the internal SSD and my documents on the external HDD. I am more than a bit surprised of the improvement that I have already seen in how well FusionDrive works. It will also make my backups easier, as I now only have to manage 1 drive versus 2 drives in my backup strategy. Unless you do major processor-intensive tasks, I'd say go for FusionDrive if you have to choose between one or the other. To be honest, even the "slower" processors of today are so much more faster than the "faster" processors of just a few years ago. As an example, my MacBook Air with its dual core 2.0 GHz i7 blows the doors off of my dual core 2.8HGz processor in my iMac.