Fusion drive or go all SSD?

Had a current-gen (well, not the just announced) and the 1TB Fusion drive felt just about as fast as my latest-gen Air. I couldn't notice as much difference in day to day use to justify the additional cost.

If I was buying new I'd stick with the Fusion drive, definitely the right bang for the buck. I wasn't expecting that level of perceived performance, so I was very satisfied with it.

Takuro said:

1) Apple is charging about $1 per GB of storage for the pure-SSD solutions. The current market rate right now is approaching 50 cents per GB for most aftermarket SSDs. So you're effectively paying 2x as much. As time goes on, SSDs are only going to get cheaper.

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Are PCIe based SSDs really selling for 50 cents per GB these days? Considering that upgrading the iMac is not a trivial matter for computer illiterate users, I would be careful with suggesting that people should be taking the smallest fusion drive and waiting for some magical aftermarket solutions coming around the corner.

theSeb said:

…I would be careful with suggesting that people should be taking the smallest fusion drive and waiting for some magical aftermarket solutions coming around the corner.

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So you would recommend to invest more money to take the 256 GB / 512 GB SSD instead of a 1TB Fusion Drive? This is a tough nut. Of course i want that my first iMac will be a long-lasting relationship but I'm not sure if i should spend all that money for a ssd. Anyone know If it were possible to change the FD's HDD afterwards (after 2 years of warranty and when ssd's become significantly more favourable) to receive a iMac with 2 intern SSDs? That would be a nice best-value workaround.

(Sry for my bad english - > not a native speaker/writer)

bstfn said:

So you would recommend to invest more money to take the 256 GB / 512 GB SSD instead of a 1TB Fusion Drive?

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I expect it depends on your storage needs. In my case, I selected the 256GB SSD option instead of the Fusion Drive because I have an 8TB NAS that holds all my media.

Given the design of the iMac , personally , I would never buy one with a rotating mass { HDD }.

At some point in time it will fail , anything with moving parts will fail.

Even though SSD`s are not perfect , they are without moving parts.

My suggestion would be cancel or amend your order if possible.

It will cost more , but it will last longer.

If you go with an HDD , you might bump your desk , or bump your iMac and all it takes is one nudge the wrong way and your HDD is trashed.

With an SSD , you could bounce it off the wall ( not recommended ) and it would still work.

Just I thought , I am sure there will be folks that disagree with me , but that is fine.

I am just telling you like it is !!

I have a 2010 Mac Mini with an HDD and I refuse to even touch it when it is on.

I also have a 1st generation MBP-R 15" and I have no problem moving that while it is running. Just 2 moving parts , the fans !!

Best of luck , no matter what you choose.

Later ,

Gary 

theSeb said:

Are PCIe based SSDs really selling for 50 cents per GB these days? Considering that upgrading the iMac is not a trivial matter for computer illiterate users, I would be careful with suggesting that people should be taking the smallest fusion drive and waiting for some magical aftermarket solutions coming around the corner.

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I never said they should do the upgrade themselves. I was pretty clear that an Apple-certified tech could do it. The aftermarket solutions aren't vaporware, they will come eventually.

50 cents / GB is for non-PCIe solutions, so I fouled up on this and will remove mention of it. Apple's drives are actually very good value compared to the cost of other PCIe drives I'd seen on Amazon, which currently don't even come close to 1TB in capacity. Apple is way ahead of the game, it seems, with adopting this tech. Still, $1k is a lot to lay down for a 1TB drive and I'd be interested to see what the aftermarket comes up with. They have major catching up, no doubt.

212rikanmofo said:

I read somewhere that using an ssd as your primary drive is not good. When data gets written and deleted to the ssd it will wear out much faster and can lead to failure. I've read this from a few different sources but it was on a windows machine. So not sure if this same principle applies to the Mac as well?

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So if you don't get a SSD, then you're going to get a traditional drive, which has platters inside that are literally spinning at the rate of several thousand times per minute. It's not like that design never wears out either.

Apple's been selling a SSD version of the MacBook Air since 2007, and while I've haven't read literally every post on here, I haven't seen any threads where owners are coming back 5+ years later and complaining en masse that their SSD has failed from too many writes.

If money is no objective, get a big SSD drive. I got a personal MacBook Air with a 512GB SSD, and I've got a work Mac mini with a 1TB Fusion drive. Day-to-day usage, the mini + Fusion drive doesn't feel noticeably slower than the Air with the big SSD drive. I don't run Adobe stuff on the mini, but I do a lot with VMWare Fusion + virtual machines, and the Fusion drive has been smart enough to keep the VM stuff on the SSD part of the Fusion drive, while moving all of my downloads and stuff that I don't use frequently off to the spinning-drive part of the Fusion drive.

Worrying about ssd wear rate is not a concern for home users. You will sell the computer, or other parts of the system will fail, a long time before you wear out the ssd.

OP, the fusion drive is a good alternative for a typical home user. However, personally I would always choose the ssd + external USB 3 or thunderbolt drive in an iMac.

Jedi said:

Given the design of the iMac , personally , I would never buy one with a rotating mass { HDD }.

At some point in time it will fail , anything with moving parts will fail.

Even though SSD`s are not perfect , they are without moving parts.

My suggestion would be cancel or amend your order if possible.

It will cost more , but it will last longer.

If you go with an HDD , you might bump your desk , or bump your iMac and all it takes is one nudge the wrong way and your HDD is trashed.

With an SSD , you could bounce it off the wall ( not recommended ) and it would still work.

Just I thought , I am sure there will be folks that disagree with me , but that is fine.

I am just telling you like it is !!

I have a 2010 Mac Mini with an HDD and I refuse to even touch it when it is on.

I also have a 1st generation MBP-R 15" and I have no problem moving that while it is running. Just 2 moving parts , the fans !!

Best of luck , no matter what you choose.

Later ,

Gary 

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You're right - I don't agree.
You're wrong - you're not 'telling us like it is'. You're giving us your opinion.

If hard drives were that fragile, then the streets of the world would be full of laptop owners queuing to get new hard drives.

JustMartin said:

You're right - I don't agree.
You're wrong - you're not 'telling us like it is'. You're giving us your opinion.

If hard drives were that fragile, then the streets of the world would be full of laptop owners queuing to get new hard drives.

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I was gonna say, I've bounced my MacBook off things more times than I can count and, somehow, it still functions.

Thank goodness the world is full of iPods with SDDs that have never failed...

fig said:

I was gonna say, I've bounced my MacBook off things more times than I can count and, somehow, it still functions.

Thank goodness the world is full of iPods with SDDs that have never failed...

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Good thing that the iMac is a bit to heavy to go on a cruise with it

I'm a graphic and motion designer so i need a fast system and disk space for resources and material (even when i'm using cloud services the data still remains in a local folders). In addition to it i want to use this mac for some games since my Windows-System from 2006 gets to old for that (<- will install Bootcamp). Bad thing is that spending money is point for me. I have already a external drive so I can use it as a backup for the FD. But you're right; if the hdd crashes i lost everything.

So if I'm gonna choose the SSD i should buy a external (USB3) HD for stuff. Thats plain. But then i need another HD for TM Backups aren't (more money...)? And together with a external br-drive most of the USB ports will be used.

I decided against the Fusion Drive because I will use Bootcamp to run Windows 8 in parallel. With Fusion Drive you are limited to the HDD part only - Windows will not benefit from the speed of the SSD. At the end it is mainly a question of the available budget... The 512 GB SSD's in my laptops are using between 100 - 150 GB of space in maximum even with a Windows 8 virtual machine installed. On the iMac it is different. With the option to play games on it I decided to create a 250 GB partition for Windows in parallel to Mac OS. All my photos and movies are stored externally on a Synology NAS, so storage space isn't really a problem (connected via Gigabit to the iMac)

I bought an iMac with the Fusion Drive last year, and decided to "split" the Fusion Drive into its components (in my case, 128GB SSD and 1TB hard drive).

This let me install the OS and frequently used data on the SSD for maximum performance, and my bulk data (videos, music, etc.) on the HDD. It works really well, and I like being able to manage my own data.

There are several tutorials on how to split a fusion drive online. It involves reinstalling the OS, but if you're an advanced user you should have no problem doing that.

Jedi said:

Given the design of the iMac , personally , I would never buy one with a rotating mass { HDD }.

At some point in time it will fail , anything with moving parts will fail.

Even though SSD`s are not perfect , they are without moving parts.

My suggestion would be cancel or amend your order if possible.

It will cost more , but it will last longer.

Click to expand...

I think you lost some readers after this point, but I'm going to support this contention regardless. My older iMac is sitting with a dead internal platter HD and an external SDD as it's sole storage. The rest of the computer just keeps going.

Avoid HD if you can, so only get fusion if you can't fit all your stuff on an SSD you can afford.

fig said:

I was gonna say, I've bounced my MacBook off things more times than I can count and, somehow, it still functions.

Thank goodness the world is full of iPods with SDDs that have never failed...

Click to expand...

I am not aware of any iPod that ever had an SSD? Can you please elaborate?

On the other hand I have had 3 hard drives fail on me in laptops and I have lost more desktop hard drives than I care to remember. Look guys, your anecdotal evidence is great, but physical hard drives fail all the time around the world. SSDs can fail too. The likelihood of a failure to a home user is reduced by using an SSD.

theSeb said:

I am not aware of any iPod that ever had an SSD? Can you please elaborate?

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iPod Nano (all of them)
iPod Shuffle (all of them)
iPod Touch (every single one!)
iPhone (damn straight)

However, the SSDs in the first two last practically forever because they are mostly read from. They only get writes when you sync music which is likely less often than you listen. I've not heard of SSD failures in the iPod Touch or iPhone, but who knows, it probably happens sometimes.

zorinlynx said:

iPod Nano (all of them)
iPod Shuffle (all of them)
iPod Touch (every single one!)
iPhone (damn straight)

However, the SSDs in the first two last practically forever because they are mostly read from. They only get writes when you sync music which is likely less often than you listen. I've not heard of SSD failures in the iPod Touch or iPhone, but who knows, it probably happens sometimes.

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None of those have SSDs in what we know as SSDs. They use flash memory for storage. SSDs also use "flash memory"' but that's like saying tyres are made of rubber and because my wheel barrow tyre went flat, I am worried about my car tyre now too because it is also made of rubber. Trying to equate reliability of flash storage in iPods, or any other devices, to reliability of SSDs is just plain silly and was the reason why I responded with that question to fig.

ElectronGuru said:

Avoid HD if you can, so only get fusion if you can't fit all your stuff on an SSD you can afford.

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My thoughts exactly. Unless you need access to this stuff all the time, I'd also consider "archiving" to external USB drives; just remember to back these up too!

jg321 said:

My thoughts exactly. Unless you need access to this stuff all the time, I'd also consider "archiving" to external USB drives; just remember to back these up too!

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Funnily i lost my most important external hard drive by falling down from a living room table (30cm) on a carpet!! So when i'm thinking about it i don't entrust my life a hd anymore. And i don't believe that a 512 GB disk will be such soon fully.

So at the end of the day (it's actually darkling here ) i bought a nice i7, 8gb Ram, GTX 780M 4GB with a 512 GB SSD. A lot of money for a poor student but i think/hope it will make it worth again the next 4-5 years.

bstfn said:

Funnily i lost my most important external hard drive by falling down from a living room table (30cm) on a carpet!! So when i'm thinking about it i don't entrust my life a hd anymore. And i don't believe that a 512 GB disk will be such soon fully.

So at the end of the day (it's actually darkling here ) i bought a nice i7, 8gb Ram, GTX 780M 4GB with a 512 GB SSD. A lot of money for a poor student but i think/hope it will make it worth again the next 4-5 years.

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Not quite dark here in the UK yet, but getting there! Yeah - having stuff on an external does make backup a little more tricky - easy to forget to actually back that up as well.

Sounds like you've made a good decision - always a good idea to spend a little more at first if it means it'll be more useful in the long run.

On a side note, I was in Munich last November. Lovely place but it was freezing cold! Never been as cold in my life, but a good excuse for a gluhwein or two!

theSeb said:

I am not aware of any iPod that ever had an SSD? Can you please elaborate?

On the other hand I have had 3 hard drives fail on me in laptops and I have lost more desktop hard drives than I care to remember. Look guys, your anecdotal evidence is great, but physical hard drives fail all the time around the world. SSDs can fail too. The likelihood of a failure to a home user is reduced by using an SSD.

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They're all flash memory, loosely based on the same concept, though I realize they aren't identical nor is it a fair comparison. The post I was referring to seemed to insinuate that we've got platter drives failing all over the place from random bumps on a table, however, and that just isn't the case.

Yes, a physical drive will eventually fail, and I'm betting that SSDs will too but we don't have the multiyear evidence yet as they haven't been around that long.

You should be backing up your stuff no matter what type of drive you're using, however, for 5 bucks a month you can archive everything online and not have to worry about it.

ElectronGuru said:

I think you lost some readers after this point, but I'm going to support this contention regardless. My older iMac is sitting with a dead internal platter HD and an external SDD as it's sole storage. The rest of the computer just keeps going.

Avoid HD if you can, so only get fusion if you can't fit all your stuff on an SSD you can afford.

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Why not replace the internal drive? I put an SSD in my older iMac and it ran great.