"do you have some kind of agenda. seems like you are jumping at every chance you can get to post that your fusion drive died . I believe you ave 3 threads devoted to telling us your fusion drive died . so I have to wonder what is your agenda?"
I am not the poster to whom you are replying, but I do think the fusion drive is a riskier proposition for most users, than would be two separate drives (SSD + HDD).
It looks great in concept, and I'm sure it runs quickly, as well -- so long as nothing goes wrong. But when something DOES go wrong, fusion will render BOTH drives unusable, and perhaps even un-recoverable (using standard data-recovery software).
Consider:
Where is the "recovery partition" stored on a fusion setup? (I'm going to _guess_ that it's located on the SSD drive, but not sure that it matters). If the drive that contains the recovery partition has a hardware failure, there will be no way to do "an emergency boot", recovery partition or no.
Consider:
If one drive of the fusion setup fails, both drives may become UNrecoverable without special software that can "sort out" the block-level tricks that fusion is using to disperse data on both drives. Can a data-recovery app like DataRescue3 recover from a single drive of a [formerly] fused setup?
Consider:
The stock answer to the question "what to do when a fusion drive fails" is going to be "well, then you just replace the failed drive and restore from your backup". But the reality is that most folks who buy Mac with fusion aren't going to keep a backup. That's just the way it goes. At least with non-fused drives, data recovery software _might_ help them in the case of a failure. But with fusion, the jury is still out on this.
Finally, from the reviews on fusion I've seen, I get the gist that fusion is considerably (perhaps remarkably) faster than an HDD, but still slower than an "outright" (non-fused) SSD.
What kind of read/write speeds are the fusion drives yielding in the new iMacs and Mini's?
If the only reason for fusion is so the average user won't be confused by two drive icons on his/her desktop instead of just one… well…. seems kind of risky for anyone who will keep the computer for any length of time (thus, becoming more vulnerable to a failure of one of the drives in the fusion setup).
I see fusion as "RAID for dummies" (in the same way I view Time Machine as "backing up for dummies"). Looks easy, but there are risks involved. I think most RAID users will tell you that the failure of one of the RAID'ed drives can cause a lot of trouble. Same with the failure of the "fused drives".
I sense that about a year down the road, we're going to start seeing one post after another from folks lamenting, "my fusion drive failed, I didn't have it backed up, what do I do now?" ...
