So how are you liking the Fusion drive?

[Yougotcarved]

Originally Posted by eroxx

Ha, that's part of my confusion, the "certain" kind of user business

It seems ridiculous that the top of the line 2012 iMac might be negligibly faster (or even perhaps slower in certain cases)than the top of the line 2010.

Its not as simple as "this iMac is faster than that one". Basically the fusion drive is half super fast speeds, half 2010 speeds, with a piece of software that dictates which apps and files run fast and which run slow.

It is a pretty smart piece of software by all accounts, so for a lot of typical usage patterns it will ensure that you only really see the fast speeds, and only running really infrequently used things on the slow speeds, and because you rarely use them you will rarely notice the drop in speed.

This is where the "certain type of user comes in". Basically, if you can deal with having SSD speeds most of the time, and having no control over which things run fast or slow for a lower cost, then Fusion is for you.

However someone like me would hate the fact that if I want to use a program I don't use very often then I will have to run it on HDD speeds for a while before the computer moves it to the SSD, or the fact that the computer will (probably) put stuff on the SSD that will barely benefit from SSD speeds (like songs/movies) and leave some apps on the HDD.

[Chris Blount]

Originally Posted by theSeb

Hold on. Are you telling me that you judge and compare storage performance by whether you notice a slow down? I don't even know what to say to that.

Originally Posted by WilliamG

Yes necessarily! We don't need to use a Fusion drive to know how it works. 255GB of your 375GB used is stored on a regular, spinning hard disk. The software is "intelligently" decided which blocks are stored where, and that is all. During downtime those blocks are shifted around, but that still means that 355GB of data is on a spinning disk, which, in my eyes, is unforgivable in a Mac Product in nigh-2013.

Typical answers from someone who has never used a Fusion drive. Why do people around here seem to know everything without actually having any hands on experience? Give it a rest. Until you have a Mac with a Fusion drive and have used it for a few days, we can talk.

[vannibombonato]

Originally Posted by Chris Blount

Typical answers from someone who has never used a Fusion drive. Why do people around here seem to know everything without actually having any hands on experience? Give it a rest. Until you have a Mac with a Fusion drive and have used it for a few days, we can talk.

I've added a Fusion Drive myself (coupled with external SSD), but it's fair to say that once you pass the 128gb storage you will experience a significant slowdown in performance, sooner or later.
That is, unless you NEVER use whatever data the fusion stores beyond the SSD part, which doesn't seem like a realistic scenario (why would the data be sitting there?).

It's possible that you'll seldom notice the slowdown, it's possible that it's something perfectly fine for the majority of users, but it's not possible to say that if you have data on the Fusion above the SSD capacity the speed will consistently be SSD-like, it's just a fact.

128GBs are really a small amount of data, the instant you have a big media library you will have to deal with HDD speeds (let alone any "pro" work like video-photo editing).

Don't want to mean that the internal SSD Apple option is the way to go, but no-one can say that there's no significant performance difference for a user who is loading the Fusion drive with loads of data, it's just math.

[eroxx]

Let me ask this:

How significantly slower is an external (thunderbolt) SSD vs an internal

[motrek]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

...
128GBs are really a small amount of data, the instant you have a big media library you will have to deal with HDD speeds (let alone any "pro" work like video-photo editing).
...

It doesn't matter if photos are stored on an SSD or the hard drive.

For video playback, it doesn't matter if videos are stored on the hard drive either.

I suppose if you are a professional editing a feature length movie in HD then you might appreciate having all your files stored on a huge SSD but you probably aren't considering Apple's standard storage solutions to do this kind of work.

[Yougotcarved]

Originally Posted by motrek

It doesn't matter if photos are stored on an SSD or the hard drive.

For video playback, it doesn't matter if videos are stored on the hard drive either.

I suppose if you are a professional editing a feature length movie in HD then you might appreciate having all your files stored on a huge SSD but you probably aren't considering Apple's standard storage solutions to do this kind of work.

Thats the point, by all accounts if I open that video a few times, Fusion will put it on the SSD, which is not what anyone would actually want. This is a downside of fusion.

[vannibombonato]

Originally Posted by eroxx

Let me ask this:

How significantly slower is an external (thunderbolt) SSD vs an internal

It's not significantly slower, it's significantly faster.

----------

Originally Posted by motrek

It doesn't matter if photos are stored on an SSD or the hard drive.

For video playback, it doesn't matter if videos are stored on the hard drive either.

I suppose if you are a professional editing a feature length movie in HD then you might appreciate having all your files stored on a huge SSD but you probably aren't considering Apple's standard storage solutions to do this kind of work.

??? "It doesn't matter if photos are stored on an SSD or the hard drive" ???

Let me tell you that it does matter, it matters a whole lot. Try browsing an 8GB photo shooting with an SSD or an HDD, you'll see how much it matters.
Try playing with Final Cut with video edits imported from an SSD or an HDD.

It's not that without an SSD it does not work, it has worked for years. But it's just an improvement of such magnitude that once you try it, going backwards is like going back to black and white TV once you have tried color.

[Yougotcarved]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

??? "It doesn't matter if photos are stored on an SSD or the hard drive" ???

Let me tell you that it does matter, it matters a whole lot. Try browsing an 8GB photo shooting with an SSD or an HDD, you'll see how much it matters.
Try playing with Final Cut with video edits imported from an SSD or an HDD.

It's not that without an SSD it does not work, it has worked for years. But it's just an improvement of such magnitude that once you try it, going backwards is like going back to black and white TV once you have tried color.

So did you go 768gb internal or external?

[rnb2]

I'm a bit amazed at people's inability to differentiate between what they *need* and what they (really, really) *want*. There are very few people who actually need all-SSD storage, but there are several here whose desperate want for it is breathtaking.

I've been running my 2009 i7 iMac with a FW800 SSD boot drive since I got it, with my data on the internal WD 1TB 7200 drive. The machine has always been very responsive (much better than booting from the internal). Having the OS and Applications on SSD has major benefits (even when handicapped by FW800), and certain other types of files also benefit greatly from SSD (databases, including things like Aperture/Lightroom catalogs). Typical user data, though, doesn't see much benefit from SSD. It's really the separating of OS tasks from user tasks that has the greatest benefit - once you do that, most other gains are fairly incremental.

So, given that, for the vast majority of users (even most of those vocally claiming that they MUST have pure SSD storage, because their NEED FOR SPEED can't be quenched, ever), Fusion Drive is a great solution. It gives 95% of the benefit of SSD for the great majority of tasks, while not sticking the user with the high $/GB cost of pure SSD storage. While pure SSD storage would certainly be nice to have, the costs for 1TB+ of pure SSD storage are prohibitive for the vast majority of users, but the cost for Fusion Drive is pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Personally, I'd be fine running my current setup for the foreseeable future if it wasn't for the slow speed of my external storage options (FW800/USB2). I'm a professional photographer with 2TB+ of photos on a RAID5 box that is seriously hobbled by FW800, so upgrading to a machine with Thunderbolt and USB3 is very attractive. Getting Fusion Drive and eliminating the kludgey (but functional) external SSD setup is a bonus.

[vannibombonato]

Originally Posted by Yougotcarved

So did you go 768gb internal or external?

I went for Fusion 1TB, planning on keeping data below 128GBs, and external Thunderbolt SSD all the way.

----------

Originally Posted by rnb2

I'm a bit amazed at people's inability to differentiate between what they *need* and what they (really, really) *want*. There are very few people who actually need all-SSD storage, but there are several here whose desperate want for it is breathtaking.

I've been running my 2009 i7 iMac with a FW800 SSD boot drive since I got it, with my data on the internal WD 1TB 7200 drive. The machine has always been very responsive (much better than booting from the internal). Having the OS and Applications on SSD has major benefits (even when handicapped by FW800), and certain other types of files also benefit greatly from SSD (databases, including things like Aperture/Lightroom catalogs). Typical user data, though, doesn't see much benefit from SSD. It's really the separating of OS tasks from user tasks that has the greatest benefit - once you do that, most other gains are fairly incremental.

So, given that, for the vast majority of users (even most of those vocally claiming that they MUST have pure SSD storage, because their NEED FOR SPEED can't be quenched, ever), Fusion Drive is a great solution. It gives 95% of the benefit of SSD for the great majority of tasks, while not sticking the user with the high $/GB cost of pure SSD storage. While pure SSD storage would certainly be nice to have, the costs for 1TB+ of pure SSD storage are prohibitive for the vast majority of users, but the cost for Fusion Drive is pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Personally, I'd be fine running my current setup for the foreseeable future if it wasn't for the slow speed of my external storage options (FW800/USB2). I'm a professional photographer with 2TB+ of photos on a RAID5 box that is seriously hobbled by FW800, so upgrading to a machine with Thunderbolt and USB3 is very attractive. Getting Fusion Drive and eliminating the kludgey (but functional) external SSD setup is a bonus.

Agree with many points, but running an SSD over a FW interface it's just crazy to me. Like buying a Ferrari and never pass second gear.

[motrek]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

??? "It doesn't matter if photos are stored on an SSD or the hard drive" ???

Let me tell you that it does matter, it matters a whole lot. Try browsing an 8GB photo shooting with an SSD or an HDD, you'll see how much it matters.
Try playing with Final Cut with video edits imported from an SSD or an HDD.

It's not that without an SSD it does not work, it has worked for years. But it's just an improvement of such magnitude that once you try it, going backwards is like going back to black and white TV once you have tried color.

Sorry, but disagree. You can load any given photo from a hard drive in a matter of milliseconds and OS X indexes photos so it can display thumbnails of them instantly. I assume any reasonable photography software keeps its own database of thumbnails too.

So while it might be nice to put a photo collection on an SSD and then click through them as fast as you can like a rabid monkey and get excited that you are seeing the full-resolution photos almost instantly, what practical value does that have, really?

And any photo or video editing software will use RAM and swap files on the SSD portion of a Fusion drive so it doesn't really matter if the source files are stored on a hard drive or not--they only have to be read in once.

[Yougotcarved]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

I went for Fusion 1TB, planning on keeping data below 128GBs, and external Thunderbolt SSD all the way.[COLOR="#808080"]

How would you run Windows? Just accept HDD speeds? Tthis is what I'm wrestling with and why I might pay the ridiculous $$ for the internal SSD

[vannibombonato]

Originally Posted by Yougotcarved

How would you run Windows? Just accept HDD speeds? Tthis is what I'm wrestling with and why I might pay the ridiculous $$ for the internal SSD

I'm planning on installing Windows indeed, but i'll only be using it for a few games that i currently play on XBox, it's probably going to be 5-10% of my usage max. I've grown up unfortunately :-)
I don't care at all about a game taking 15secs to load instead of 5, i certainly don't care even the 1% out the 100% that would be needed to spend that amount of money for the internal Apple SSD option.

Truth to be told, i could happily keep on playing on the XBox, i'll be installing Windows just for the pure joy of enjoying a few games on the big screen at high details, but that's a luxury, i could certainly live without it.

Obviously if having Windows for whatever the reason going at SSD speed is a must for you the only Apple option you have is the internal SSD, but i would seriously question myself if i wouldn't be better off in building a dedicated PC.

----------

Originally Posted by motrek

Sorry, but disagree. You can load any given photo from a hard drive in a matter of milliseconds and OS X indexes photos so it can display thumbnails of them instantly. I assume any reasonable photography software keeps its own database of thumbnails too.

So while it might be nice to put a photo collection on an SSD and then click through them as fast as you can like a rabid monkey and get excited that you are seeing the full-resolution photos almost instantly, what practical value does that have, really?

And any photo or video editing software will use RAM and swap files on the SSD portion of a Fusion drive so it doesn't really matter if the source files are stored on a hard drive or not--they only have to be read in once.

Honestly, you are talking about an average consumer photo library, and i can agree with you on that.
You don't know what working and browsing through hundreds (or thousands) of hi-res photo mean. Using an SSD DOES make a huge difference, just as much as it makes booting from an HDD or from an SSD, and 128GBs are nowhere near the amount of space you're going to need. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of measurable facts.

Again, there was photography in 1800s, there was photography in 1900s, there was photography with HDDs, there is photography with SSDs. The workflow is just way better, SSDs are the single most important performance-breakthrough we had in the last 5 years.

And i'm talking photo here, try playing a 45gbs Piano Library from an HDD or from an SSD and come back to me, let alone playing it while the other 10 tracks are streaming from other audio libraries.

[Yougotcarved]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

Obviously if having Windows for whatever the reason going at SSD speed is a must for you the only Apple option you have is the internal SSD, but i would seriously question myself if i wouldn't be better off in building a dedicated PC.[COLOR="#808080"]

Surely a dedicated PC with SSD would cost more than the £700 upgrade from 1TB fusion to SSD?

[vannibombonato]

Originally Posted by Yougotcarved

Surely a dedicated PC with SSD would cost more than the £700 upgrade from 1TB fusion to SSD?

I'm not familiar with the PC market, but i guess yes, it would cost more.

The point is that you would get for sure an incredibly better "bang for the buck", especially if you don't need much SSD space. I love Macs, but we all know we pay a relevant premium on them. Buying a Mac to run Windows a lot doesn't make much sense to me.

Most importantly, if for instance you want Win for games (why else, by the way?), having a PC will allow you to upgrade and keep up to speed in the future, with the iMac you'll be stuck and in a couple of years from now be outdated.
I'm obviously assuming you need/want top-top win performance and are ready to pay for it.

[flynz4]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

Again, there was photography in 1800s, there was photography in 1900s, there was photography with HDDs, there is photography with SSDs. The workflow is just way better, SSDs are the single most important performance-breakthrough we had in the last 5 years.

I agree. My Aperture 3 library is currently 360GB. The SSD advantage comes when accessing and scrolling through many 1000's of photos. The performance difference between HDD and SSD is stunning.

There is no way my 360GB library can fit in a 128GB SSD portion of a fusion drive. It may be fine for the vast majority of people who have a few thousand home photos... but it just doesn't work well for a large and complex photo library.

/Jim

[Yougotcarved]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

I'm not familiar with the PC market, but i guess yes, it would cost more.

The point is that you would get for sure an incredibly better "bang for the buck", especially if you don't need much SSD space. I love Macs, but we all know we pay a relevant premium on them. Buying a Mac to run Windows a lot doesn't make much sense to me.

Most importantly, if for instance you want Win for games (why else, by the way?), having a PC will allow you to upgrade and keep up to speed in the future, with the iMac you'll be stuck and in a couple of years from now be outdated.
I'm obviously assuming you need/want top-top win performance and are ready to pay for it.

Yeah all very good points. I dunno I'm a bit confused really. I want an iMac cos they look beautiful, I want OSX for a change from windows and am happy to pay the premium as a treat for myself...one I could justify since I haven';t got a new computer since 2008. I would only ever boot windows for software that can't run on OSX. I'm not really a heavy gamer but I'm paranoid that there will be software released in the future that I really want but need Windows for and it would suck to have to go back to HDD speed if that ever happened.

Maybe this isn't the best rational for spending so much cash at this point though...£700 isnt a VAST sum but maybe its too much for a slight fear that I might need fast Windows speed in future...

[Chris Blount]

Originally Posted by rnb2

I'm a bit amazed at people's inability to differentiate between what they *need* and what they (really, really) *want*. There are very few people who actually need all-SSD storage, but there are several here whose desperate want for it is breathtaking.

I've been running my 2009 i7 iMac with a FW800 SSD boot drive since I got it, with my data on the internal WD 1TB 7200 drive. The machine has always been very responsive (much better than booting from the internal). Having the OS and Applications on SSD has major benefits (even when handicapped by FW800), and certain other types of files also benefit greatly from SSD (databases, including things like Aperture/Lightroom catalogs). Typical user data, though, doesn't see much benefit from SSD. It's really the separating of OS tasks from user tasks that has the greatest benefit - once you do that, most other gains are fairly incremental.

So, given that, for the vast majority of users (even most of those vocally claiming that they MUST have pure SSD storage, because their NEED FOR SPEED can't be quenched, ever), Fusion Drive is a great solution. It gives 95% of the benefit of SSD for the great majority of tasks, while not sticking the user with the high $/GB cost of pure SSD storage. While pure SSD storage would certainly be nice to have, the costs for 1TB+ of pure SSD storage are prohibitive for the vast majority of users, but the cost for Fusion Drive is pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Personally, I'd be fine running my current setup for the foreseeable future if it wasn't for the slow speed of my external storage options (FW800/USB2). I'm a professional photographer with 2TB+ of photos on a RAID5 box that is seriously hobbled by FW800, so upgrading to a machine with Thunderbolt and USB3 is very attractive. Getting Fusion Drive and eliminating the kludgey (but functional) external SSD setup is a bonus.

Well said. It's nice to see someone with a head on their shoulders around here.

[Yougotcarved]

Originally Posted by rnb2

I'm a bit amazed at people's inability to differentiate between what they *need* and what they (really, really) *want*. There are very few people who actually need all-SSD storage, but there are several here whose desperate want for it is breathtaking.

I've been running my 2009 i7 iMac with a FW800 SSD boot drive since I got it, with my data on the internal WD 1TB 7200 drive. The machine has always been very responsive (much better than booting from the internal). Having the OS and Applications on SSD has major benefits (even when handicapped by FW800), and certain other types of files also benefit greatly from SSD (databases, including things like Aperture/Lightroom catalogs). Typical user data, though, doesn't see much benefit from SSD. It's really the separating of OS tasks from user tasks that has the greatest benefit - once you do that, most other gains are fairly incremental.

So, given that, for the vast majority of users (even most of those vocally claiming that they MUST have pure SSD storage, because their NEED FOR SPEED can't be quenched, ever), Fusion Drive is a great solution. It gives 95% of the benefit of SSD for the great majority of tasks, while not sticking the user with the high $/GB cost of pure SSD storage. While pure SSD storage would certainly be nice to have, the costs for 1TB+ of pure SSD storage are prohibitive for the vast majority of users, but the cost for Fusion Drive is pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Personally, I'd be fine running my current setup for the foreseeable future if it wasn't for the slow speed of my external storage options (FW800/USB2). I'm a professional photographer with 2TB+ of photos on a RAID5 box that is seriously hobbled by FW800, so upgrading to a machine with Thunderbolt and USB3 is very attractive. Getting Fusion Drive and eliminating the kludgey (but functional) external SSD setup is a bonus.

Obviously we COULD all just buy a £200 Windows desktop to send email, thats about all anyone NEEDS to do. This is a bit mundane, we're all here because we WANT a shiny new toy and I don't think there's any point going into what one "needs" and "wants" because NOBODY needs an Apple machine they only want it. If somebody wants an SSD to speed up their life whats wrong with that?

[WilliamG]

Originally Posted by rnb2

Fusion Drive is a great solution. It gives 95% of the benefit of SSD for the great majority of tasks

No, for "some" / "a lot" of the time it gives 100% of the benefit of SSD. It's the other times it gives 0% of the benefit of SSD, and that's the issue.

[Canadian Bacon]

Originally Posted by ThaDog

Then start using your 3 braincells.
Like i told you, i found the link... and it wasn't that hard.
So yeah, i am an ass.. who cares

I think you'll find that many people on these forums care whether you act like an ass or not. You're doing a pretty good job of it so far, although you could have just apologised and gained a bit of credibility back. And as far as using your brain goes, most people who quote an external link would anticipate - in advance - that it would be in their own best interest to just provide the link. It takes so little effort on your part - and people will thank you for it.

But by all means, please keep on digging your own grave.

[jmgregory1]

I could be wrong, but for those that are complaining that their 200+ gb library of photos in Aperture will overwhelm the 128gb ssd side of a Fusion drive, I'm pretty sure that you're not actively looking at and working on all 200+ gb's every time you work in Aperture.

Chances are greater that it is certain files and certain bits of data and those will run from the ssd. Are there scenarios where you may see some slowdown? I'm sure there are but the extreme high data size cases are probably those where you should be expected to pay for a more expensive all ssd solution. Honestly, the fact that you can take an external ssd drive connected via tb at internal (almost) rates, makes this whole conversation seem pointless.

That and until people actually live with their Fusion drives and understand first hand how they'll impact their work, there is just a lot of guessing going on.

[motrek]

Originally Posted by vannibombonato

...
Honestly, you are talking about an average consumer photo library, and i can agree with you on that.
You don't know what working and browsing through hundreds (or thousands) of hi-res photo mean. Using an SSD DOES make a huge difference, just as much as it makes booting from an HDD or from an SSD, and 128GBs are nowhere near the amount of space you're going to need. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of measurable facts. ...

From my understanding there's a night and day difference between booting and browsing through photos. When you boot, the OS needs to access thousands of small files basically at random, so an SSD can speed up the process by (let's say) 5x or more. That's a massive tangible benefit. What in a photographer's workflow is sped up nearly that much by an SSD?

Personally I do development and using an SSD speeds up my project build times by about 5x because that requires similar accessing of hundreds of small files in quick succession. A build that used to require 45 seconds might be finished in less than 10 seconds. That dramatically changes my workflow because now I can make a smaller change to my code and test it out almost immediately whereas before I had to group more changes together and couldn't test/refine each one individually.

But for the life of me I can't figure out what in a photographer's workflow would be limited by hard drive speed, since you can already scroll/browse through 10s of gigabytes of photos as fast as you can move your mouse because of thumbnail databases. (And how often do you really need to do something like that anyway?!)

[vannibombonato]

Originally Posted by Chris Blount

Well said. It's nice to see someone with a head on their shoulders around here.

Way to go, because here everybody "needs" a shiny new 2012 iMac.

It's depressing when people consider just exactly what they want and and can afford to buy what is needed, while all the others who are purchasing something better and more expensive are a bunch of idiots who don't know what they "need" and the value of money.

Usually once these type of guys have access to more money their "needs" suddenly increase.

Grow up.

----------

Originally Posted by motrek

From my understanding there's a night and day difference between booting and browsing through photos. When you boot, the OS needs to access thousands of small files basically at random, so an SSD can speed up the process by (let's say) 5x or more. That's a massive tangible benefit. What in a photographer's workflow is sped up nearly that much by an SSD?

Personally I do development and using an SSD speeds up my project build times by about 5x because that requires similar accessing of hundreds of small files in quick succession. A build that used to require 45 seconds might be finished in less than 10 seconds. That dramatically changes my workflow because now I can make a smaller change to my code and test it out almost immediately whereas before I had to group more changes together and couldn't test/refine each one individually.

But for the life of me I can't figure out what in a photographer's workflow would be limited by hard drive speed, since you can already scroll/browse through 10s of gigabytes of photos as fast as you can move your mouse because of thumbnail databases. (And how often do you really need to do something like that anyway?!)

I think the discussion is coming to a pointless end...let's put it this way.

Besides the "usual" stuff i do two big things with my Mac: audio production and photography. Both these tasks involve a huge amount of data (i'm talking about a terabyte of data).
I've tried using my Mac with an HDD and now with an SSD, and the difference in using the Audio/Photo apps is enormous.

Now if you're trying to convince me that 128GBs OS and Apps included would be the same i'm fine with it, but it's just not true. That's why everyone who is doing this type of work (and can afford it) uses SSDs.
It's not that without an SSD you can't do it, i did it for years, it's just that it's incredibly faster.

[theSeb]

Originally Posted by motrek

From my understanding there's a night and day difference between booting and browsing through photos. When you boot, the OS needs to access thousands of small files basically at random, so an SSD can speed up the process by (let's say) 5x or more. That's a massive tangible benefit. What in a photographer's workflow is sped up nearly that much by an SSD?

Quite a lot of things in a photographer's workflow can be sped up a lot by using a SSD, especially if they involve batch processing of files.

For example (these are excerpts from a long post that I wrote about performance http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1293809 ):



As usual, the Mini with a Vertex 3 SSD takes the lead. Looking at the Mini with a mechanical hard drive the extra RAM does speed up the operation by 4 seconds so there is some caching going on. The 2009 MBP is not far behind the Mini server, despite its age and slow CPU. The upgraded RAM and Momentus XT HDD are helping to keep it in the running. Again the difference between the dual core + slow SSD MBA and the quad core + fast SSD Mini is minimal at 2 seconds.

The CPU takes a backstage in this test and the key factor is storage system speed. If the workload increases (number of images / resolution of images) then a faster SSD and more RAM will help. As long as your computer is not running out of RAM, having more generally does not make it faster. In this case the storage is the engine, the RAM is the tyres and the CPU is the suspension.



This is actually the most intensive benchmark that I ran in terms of the storage and RAM. CPU plays an insignificant role. The test uses Pixelmator actions in Automator to add the watermark and this uses a lot of memory resulting in large amounts of page outs and much swapping to the HDD or SSD.

When we run out of memory we end up in a situation of disk thrashing because the virtual memory subsystem is paging in and paging out large amounts of data at the same time as the disk is trying to read and write the data required for this user operation.

The Mini with 4 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM HDD suffers badly during this test and is more than twice as slow as the 2009 MBP, which has been upgraded to 8 GB of RAM. If your typical workflow involves using large amounts of memory (restart, check your page outs versus page ins after your typical work day – search for more info on this forum if you’re not following) , then upgrading the RAM is the best upgrade you can do.

Take a look at the the performance of the Mini with 8 GB of RAM and 7200 HDD versus the Mini with 4 GB of RAM and a Vertex 3 SSD - the Mini with more RAM is faster, despite its slower, mechanical HDD.

Even with the excessive disk usage of the virtual memory system during this test, the slow Samsung SSD in the MBA again manages to keep up with the much faster Vertex 3 and is only 3 seconds slower.

The clear winner is the Mini with 8 GB of RAM and SSD. What would be interesting to see is how a Mini with 16 GB of RAM and a mechanical HDD would perform. Considering the fact that we end up with around 11 GB of page outs after this test, even when using 8 GB of RAM, I believe that it would be faster than the 8GB SSD equipped mini.

Personally I do development and using an SSD speeds up my project build times by about 5x because that requires similar accessing of hundreds of small files in quick succession. A build that used to require 45 seconds might be finished in less than 10 seconds. That dramatically changes my workflow because now I can make a smaller change to my code and test it out almost immediately whereas before I had to group more changes together and couldn't test/refine each one individually.

So do I - been writing code for over 20 years now, but I work on design and verification of enterprise systems these days.

It depends on which IDE is being used, but in general the storage sub-system makes very little difference to the build times, except for the very first build. As you've said, you have many little source files. A decent IDE, such as Xcode, caches all of those little source files aggressively into memory.

Compiling and building source code is CPU bound.

That is the number one performance factor. There are benchmarks out there (on macperformanceguide for example) that show what happens when you run a build from Xcode off the hard drive, then off a SSD and then finally off a RAM drive. You would expect the RAM drive to be stupidly fast, right? Well, it's actually the same speed as the SSD and if you're running the build consecutive, thanks to caching, the hard drive is not lagging behind either.

The good news is that my new PC significantly outperforms my old one. The somewhat surprising news is that the HDD is consistently marginally quicker than the SSD

Here is an old post that I wrote about this topic:

Originally Posted by theSeb

Creating these precompiled files is not a massive operation in terms of disk usage. Don't forget we're dealing with source code files, which are usually a couple of kilo bytes big.

Throwing numbers around without any context does not really prove any point. Sure, the Samsung 830 based flash storage can do around 450 MB/s reads, but it achieves those speeds when reading a large sequential file (gigabytes worth). A 3.5" 7200 RPM will do around 150-170 MB/s in those situations. A 2.5" 7200 RPM would do around 90-110 MB/s.

The flash storage won't hit anywhere close to those numbers reading small source code files and your other resources for compilation. RAM is more than 10 times faster than 450 MB/s and yet benchmarks clearly show that there is no advantage to build times when building off a SSD or a RAM drive.

Therefore to suggest that compilation times will be faster on the 2012 MBA in comparison to the 2011 MBA because of the SSD speed difference is a fallacy. The benchmarks also show that even a mechanical HDD does not slow down the compile times, so why would there be a difference between the 2011 MBA SSD and the 2012's SSD? Xcode compile times are bound by the CPU and RAM to a smaller extent. Again though, it does not matter that you're running your browser and other things at the same time. Consider how big your source code actually is. I've worked on quite a lot of large scale enterprise applications and even then the source code is in megabytes, not gigabytes. It will easily fit into the RAM and your storage speed is not a factor in compile times. Even if you're paging out the differences between the 2011 and the 2012 SSDs will not be noticeable.

This does not apply to Xcode only. You'll find the same thing with Visual Studio. Compile times are bound by the CPU and you can prove this to yourself by googling. Example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8...tories-no-theo

Will everything feel more responsive with a SSD as opposed to a HDD? Yes, of course it will. But, again, that sort of thing won't be noticeable when going from a 2011 MBA to a 2012 MBA just because the SSD is faster. Your application might open 0.5 seconds faster. That's why SSD benchmarks are massively intensive operations with lots of things happening at the same time to try and show differences between SSDs. Otherwise you'll find that they all perform nearly the same in things like UI response (opening and closing apps)

I am going to repeat what I've said previously. Unless you're copying or working with large files (e.g. batch job to process lots of raw photo files or similar), then you won't notice a huge difference between the 2011 MBA SSD and the 2012 MBA SSD.

This is a slightly old benchmark, but it illustrates the point

Originally Posted by Anandtech

Even going back two generations of SSDs, at the same capacity nearly all of these drives perform within a couple of percent of one another. Note that the Vertex 3 is even a 6Gbps drive and doesn't even outperform its predecessor.

In doing these real world use tests I get a good feel for when a drive is actually faster or slower than another. My experiences typically track with the benchmark results but it's always important to feel it first hand. What I've noticed is that although single tasks perform very similarly on all SSDs, it's during periods of heavy I/O activity that you can feel the difference between drives. Unfortunately these periods of heavy I/O activity aren't easily measured, at least in a repeatable fashion. Getting file copies, compiles, web browsing, application launches, IM log updates and searches to all start at the same time while properly measuring overall performance is near impossible without some sort of automated tool.

But for the life of me I can't figure out what in a photographer's workflow would be limited by hard drive speed, since you can already scroll/browse through 10s of gigabytes of photos as fast as you can move your mouse because of thumbnail databases. (And how often do you really need to do something like that anyway?!)

As I mentioned above, if someone is a real professional photographer, then the ability to batch process thousands of photos as quickly as possible is very important. If you are mucking about with a camera and then browsing those files, then hard drive speed is not so important.