Yes, 1000 apologies...
You did say MTBF went down! I was sadly thinking you meant the failure rate went down...
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Apple's New 'Fusion Drive' Not a Typical Hybrid Drive
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Yes, 1000 apologies...
You did say MTBF went down! I was sadly thinking you meant the failure rate went down...
I just finished reading this, very interesting.
It looks like the dream of using thunderbolt to "upgrade" my 2011 imac using external SSD & HDD drives have been dashed. I guess I will see where hybrid drives are currently, or switch to a manually managed SSD & HDD setup.
In that scenario (150 GB of photos, and looking at all of them), 75% would be on the SSD drive, so things would in any case be a lot faster than without SSD.
eBay, but I made a mistake. You can easily find a 2TB hard drive for $90, and it's tougher to find it for $80.
What about the fact that Windows filter drivers have supported underlying RAID configurations long before Apple OS had memory protection?
What about volume mount points (reparse points) that let you add drives to Windows without adding drive letters? (And reparse points have many other features.)
Your statement is ignorant - it describes a Windows system from the last century, not the current system.
Bingo. All gone. Hope that you can restore from backups.
I put XTs in my three daily use laptops. A fine investment.
Do you unplug your external drives before upgrading Apple OSX? Many people were very sorry that they didn't.
Apple's QA (Quality Assurance) team has been missing in action for years. Initial releases of systems have had some serious flaws.
Due to Apple's "quadruple quadrupling down on security", software ships to customers without much realistic real world testing.
Not really - it depends whether both drives have fully consistent metadata for the filesystem.
If the metadata is split between drives, then a failed drive would corrupt the metadata.
I would suspect that very little would be recoverable if either drive failed.
If one drive fails, all the files and metadata on the drive disappears. Your trip to Apple will give you a blank fused drive to take home to restore from backups.
Apple's marketing team is very innovative at finding catchy names for recycled products, you must admit.
Actually, in spite of "no moving parts", sudden catastrophic failures of SSDs are not uncommon.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
Edit: The video link from that page has been removed, try http://video.search.yahoo.com/video.../Crazy+Scale+-+Barney+Stinson+HIMYM+LEGENDADO or Yahoo! for "barney crazy hot" to see a funny clip.
Goodness, some scary caveats in that Apple support note.
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It's not special - Enterprise has had it for a long while - i.e. LSI CacheCade.
Apple probably repurposed something similar for it's "Fusion Drive"
This. Was first thing I thought of. Nobody seems to know if it's 100% ML doing "Fusion Drive" (other than the HW requirement for a SSD and a HDD) or there's some dedicated HW shuffling the data b/w SSD and HDD on sequential writes and file swaps (I can't see why it would be advantageous unless to free up system bus a little). Then there's the question of where the Apple Tax Sherif would permit homebrew Fusion Drives using ML/Disk Utility from existing 3rd party SSD and HDD offerings (I case of SSD I think there are better value for money options than the BTO Apple offerings).
Someone referred to other sites claim you can "bring your own SSD" but didn't leave a link and I've lost the post anyhow. Any reliable info would be great
My husband and I also have OCZ and Intel SSDs for the system and work data drives for our home workstations. (Just added an OCZ Vertex 4 - amazing, Sandforce is dead.)
And our home server does full synthetic bare metal backups of every system four times a day.
Hmmm constantly move & transfer most-used data from hdd to ssd. Which will degrade ssd performance superfast. If you know the mechanics of ssd, this doesnt sound good at all. And what the hell is this different from hybrid drive, revodrive, or etc.
this is the same thing i've been wondering...
I have a 128GB SSD + a 1TB drive in my 2011 iMac (the fat one
--the SSD is where everything lives.. but for my user folder - i created a sym~link -- and it actually is just an alias and really lives on the 1TB drive....
I used the same method. When all is said and done, we'd primarily be missing out on faster writes to the SSD instead of going direct to the HDD.
Take a look at the Apple support doc for Fusion Drive - it's a little scary:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
What about Dell and Vizio computer
Dell's and Vizio's AIO seem to have an hybrid/fusion drive that includes a 32gb SSD with 1 - 2 TB hard drive drive that the OS only views as one drive with the drive automatically stores the OS and most commonly used programs in the SSD and the rest in the hard drive.
What apple seems to have done is increased the capacity of the SSD to 128 (nobody comes close to this size), slapped a fancy term to it and does what apple does best: marry hardware and software like no other company can and make people want it.
Can someone explain the difference between what's out there and apple's approach? Or am I walking in to a minefield where everyone argues about the minute definition of "cache".
Dell's and Vizio's AIO seem to have an hybrid/fusion drive that includes a 32gb SSD with 1 - 2 TB hard drive drive that the OS only views as one drive with the drive automatically stores the OS and most commonly used programs in the SSD and the rest in the hard drive.
What apple seems to have done is increased the capacity of the SSD to 128 (nobody comes close to this size), slapped a fancy term to it and does what apple does best: marry hardware and software like no other company can and make people want it.
Can someone explain the difference between what's out there and apple's approach? Or am I walking in to a minefield where everyone argues about the minute definition of "cache".
This is a momentus development. (See what I did there?)
Until now, capacious storage and SSD-speed storage were not available together except at a severe premium.
This way, they are.
I've been using the Seagate hybrid drive for two years. It didn't work too well pre-Lion, to the extent that I removed it and used a conventional drive until Lion came out. Then I tried it under Lion and the issues had disappeared. Clearly Apple had done something at a very low level to make that drive work.
But Seagate's hybrid drives max out at 16GB of flash cache, and it's cache rather than a faster-rate band of a physical volume, which is how this seems to possibly be implemented.
Some folks wonder why the flash part of Apple's solution isn't just treated as a separate volume. I expect that would break a lot of software. Just consider the mess if an application wakes up on a different volume now and then... dude, where's my files? Maybe it could've been managed with some down-deep automatic symlink management but the potential for screwups would be very high. This approach avoids that issue.
(Not to be overly pedantic, but the repeated comments on this thread about the "higher rotational rate" at the periphery of a disk drive is not quite correct. The rotational rate is the same across the disk. It's the lineal speed that increases towards the periphery, proportional to the radius in fact, and if the interface and controller can support it there can be a higher data rate for tracks near the outer edge.)
Next up, I hope a fresh file system is in the offing.
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I've yet to hear reports of any epidemic of well-used SSDs failing in Airs, rMBPs, etc, not to mention iDevices... which in all cases have ALL read/writes done to SSD because there is no rotating media in the machine.
Flash's limited write capability was a big concern early in the technology's emergence, and I was among those who hesitated. But so far the doom-and-gloom crowd doesn't have a lot of horror stories, and it's been a few years now with no huge wave of deceased SSDs.
And there appear to be big differences vs. hybrid etc. The flash bits are much bigger, for example, and it's not used as cache. The Momentus XT's flash is entirely cache and is limited to 16GB in the top models.
Until now, capacious storage and SSD-speed storage were not available together except at a severe premium.
This way, they are.
I've been using the Seagate hybrid drive for two years. It didn't work too well pre-Lion, to the extent that I removed it and used a conventional drive until Lion came out. Then I tried it under Lion and the issues had disappeared. Clearly Apple had done something at a very low level to make that drive work.
But Seagate's hybrid drives max out at 16GB of flash cache, and it's cache rather than a faster-rate band of a physical volume, which is how this seems to possibly be implemented.
Some folks wonder why the flash part of Apple's solution isn't just treated as a separate volume. I expect that would break a lot of software. Just consider the mess if an application wakes up on a different volume now and then... dude, where's my files? Maybe it could've been managed with some down-deep automatic symlink management but the potential for screwups would be very high. This approach avoids that issue.
(Not to be overly pedantic, but the repeated comments on this thread about the "higher rotational rate" at the periphery of a disk drive is not quite correct. The rotational rate is the same across the disk. It's the lineal speed that increases towards the periphery, proportional to the radius in fact, and if the interface and controller can support it there can be a higher data rate for tracks near the outer edge.)
Next up, I hope a fresh file system is in the offing.
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I've yet to hear reports of any epidemic of well-used SSDs failing in Airs, rMBPs, etc, not to mention iDevices... which in all cases have ALL read/writes done to SSD because there is no rotating media in the machine.
Flash's limited write capability was a big concern early in the technology's emergence, and I was among those who hesitated. But so far the doom-and-gloom crowd doesn't have a lot of horror stories, and it's been a few years now with no huge wave of deceased SSDs.
And there appear to be big differences vs. hybrid etc. The flash bits are much bigger, for example, and it's not used as cache. The Momentus XT's flash is entirely cache and is limited to 16GB in the top models.
A cache is something that lives between memory and the disk, frequently accessed items get's written and read from cache and the disk is never touched, this cache works on a block level. There is nothing stopping apple from using part of their 128GB disk for this purpose, but some files can be stored more permanently on the SSD, some examples that comes to mind are OS files that are performance sensitive, let's say related to booting or the Spotlight database. Other frequently used files can be moved to the SSD if they are used frequently. This is more similar to tiered storage than cache, that is the type of storage is selected based on performance needs. Ars technica goes on to hypnotize that this is built on top of CoreStorage, a volume manager framework added in Lion.
Same here. I've got a 256 SSD coupled with a 1TB HDD.
Brain over Software!
I don't know if I actually like the idea of Fusion Drive.
I want to keep my SSD experience as pure as possible.
Fusion process
I don't really go for the whole "fusion drive" stuff.... Even though its basically done differently, and third party disk repair utilities can choose weather, or not, to support this, thats yet another reason. I'll say the later.
At least you can use these third-party utilities on an SSD.
I just looks more, "normal" *shrugs* .. Even though it looks cool.
Cal it what you want, but to me a hybrid drive, is a hybrid drive, regardless of what distinct differences Apple uses...
However, if everyone started doing this 'fusion' drive stuff.. That would be different, but one company isn't going to make a difference.
I don't really go for the whole "fusion drive" stuff.... Even though its basically done differently, and third party disk repair utilities can choose weather, or not, to support this, thats yet another reason. I'll say the later.
At least you can use these third-party utilities on an SSD.
I just looks more, "normal" *shrugs* .. Even though it looks cool.
Cal it what you want, but to me a hybrid drive, is a hybrid drive, regardless of what distinct differences Apple uses...
However, if everyone started doing this 'fusion' drive stuff.. That would be different, but one company isn't going to make a difference.
I was wondering if there was anything particularly special about the Fusion Drive.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/ssd-smart-response-video.html
It's pretty much built into the 2nd Gen Intel i series.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/ssd-smart-response-video.html
It's pretty much built into the 2nd Gen Intel i series.
Well that's because most of SSD drives are capable of garbage collection from OS itself. If it resets cell automatically, people wont find huge speed decreasing on usage.
But the problem is this. I do not know what kind of RAID settings they are using with these fusiondrive but I can definitely tell there wont be TRIM working on this flash. Without garbage collectioning, flash(ssd) will become a trash after short usage. When the software moves files, it'll overwrite on cells that had other files previously. Without wiping them off(reset). Which will cause the system to take longer to identify the file and thats where degrading starts from. I mean even with degraded speed, it'll somewhat faster than the old-fashion HDD. But then whats the point of giving up super-fast ssd speed and have a little more storage. I do understand alot of people like to have more capacity and such bur thats why we have external drive/NAS for. SSD is the next generation storage device of HDD, which meant for speed. And I find it awkward to see Apple choosing a wrong direction.
However, if fusiondrive software gives us an option reset the whole flash without any hassle(like backup os, secure-erase, or etc), then it might go well. But i still think its a bad idea.
I've had OCZ and Crucial drives just suddenly fail with no warning at all. At least with a platter HDD you get some warning of them failing!
Funny how I've got Intel SSDs that are older than both the OCZ and Crucials that I've had fail but the Intels are still going strong...
What like waking up one day to find your backup HD doesn't want to read at all?
Just because SSDs tend to fail completely, doesn't mean HDDs don't just give up too
What like waking up one day to find your backup HD doesn't want to read at all?
Just because SSDs tend to fail completely, doesn't mean HDDs don't just give up too
Try the freezer trick?
I've got my Time Machine backups running on a 6-drive NAS, filled with Enterprise Drives, and connected to UPS... paranoid LOL.
EDIT: Just recognized your username from OcUK... not seen you posting on here before!
Does this require special hardware to work, or is it all handled by software? In other words, is this something that could run on other macs that have both SSD and HD?
I certainly hope so, it's a great feature and I'd love to see users able to set it up on existing macs.
I certainly hope so, it's a great feature and I'd love to see users able to set it up on existing macs.
From the Apple KB article it sounds like this has to be done from either a new unreleased version of Disk Utility or a custom version of Disk Utility. Also, Apple may have coded Disk Utility to only allow Fusion to work with certain Macs. I think we'll need to either wait until someone gets their hands on a Fusion drive and/or the right version of disk utility in order to test it out.
10.8.2 is required, so something has been added there. A new version of Disk Utility is required. The old one would probably very confused if it encountered a Fusion drive. And the Fusion drive ships properly set up, so even new Disk Utility may not have what's needed to make this work.
On the other hand, if your 1 TB drive breaks and is replaced, the repair shop has to be able to make the Fusion drive work again. And Apple would have no reason to prevent this working anywhere else. Someone will try it once they lay their hands on a new iMac and copy Disk Utility.
There is no need for any hardware for this.
Fusion drive with an external drive would be scary. It would mean that half of your Fusion drive could disappear suddenly. I think the OS would expect that a hard drive is either there or it is not there, but with external drives a Fusion drive could be half there and half not there. That's asking for trouble.
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