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Is the fusion drive function similar to "Caching"

K

kristenanne77

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 16, 2009
102
0
Trying to understand:
This mixture of "fusion" solid state drive with slower drive seems reminiscent of something done in computers a while back called caching.except caching was done on the motherboard and Fusion" seems to be done outside the motherboard on the drives. In caching it would keep the most frequent files used available for quick access. Is that what the "fusion" drive scenerio does but on a much larger scale?

Sometimes I can't keep up with all the new words they come up with to restate something that has been done before.



K
 
throAU

throAU

macrumors G3
Feb 13, 2012
8,818
6,985
Perth, Western Australia
It is tiered storage, automatically managed.


In the OLD days, you used to manually de-frag a disk and move all the data to the start of the disk which is faster.

Fusion joins the SSD and HD into a virtual drive and moves things to the fastest part of the combined drive automatically.

Fusion does do some small level of write caching - it allocates some space for writes to go to first, so smaller, random writes can be bundled into larger blocks before going to hard disk.

This minimizes the hard drive's biggest weak point - random access speed (due to the heads having to physically move).


So its not caching, mostly.
 
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