Personally, an SSD boot drive and separate large HD seems more practical. No need to "fuse" them into one volume. Just seems like asking for trouble.
Nonsense. How is this more practical, having to manually decide what goes where? That's what you have a computer for, to do boring tasks for you.
For example: MacOS X comes with 200 printer drivers. I never use 198 of them. Should I go hunting down which ones are the ones I use, and remove the other ones, or move them somewhere else, and when I buy a new printer I spend on hour finding the missing driver, or wouldn't it be much better if the OS did that automatically for me, moving 198 of them to the hard drive over time, and when I buy a new printer, the printer driver is once or twice loaded from the spinning hard drive and then goes to the SSD drive?
Wonder why no larger SSD option, especially since you can get a much bigger SSD alone. There must be some sort of balance between the SSD and HDD components in the Fusion configuration.
Probably because anything over 128 GB doesn't give much speed advantage anymore for most users. Lots of things on your hard drive are not used for long times.
Very interesting, though I'm wondering what if one of those drives fail. Is your data retrievable from the other one?
Same as now. Your data is retrievable from your Time Machine backup. If you don't have one, that's your won fault.
So how is the fusion drive going to handle Bootcamp? Is the fusion drive handled by OSX or is it baked into the hardware ?
You have partitions. With plain MacOS X setup, you have one partition covering two drives. With Bootcamp, you will have one partition covering the SSD and the start of the spinning hard drive, and another covering the rest of the spinning hard drive. Bootcamp uses the second partition and runs unchanged.
It sounds like it's not duplicated. You have 128GB extra space. Files are either on the SSD or the HD, not both.
Apple could actually do better. You heard of file fragmentation, which is when a file is split into non-contiguous parts on your hard drive. Now if you have say any Quicktime files (music and movies), you could have intentional fragmentation, where the metadata (title, artist, cover image) and maybe the first five seconds of music are on the SSD drive, and the actual music / video on the spinning drive. So iTunes would run at SSD speed, except for playing the music.
And since this is on a per-file basis, when you have an app that is localized in 20 different languages, 19 of them should go to the spinning hard drive automatically.
I would rather have a dedicated SSD and a separate hard disk, not this "FUSION" deal -- I would like to make sure the SSD is ONLY being used for my system and Applications, which need the extra speed constantly.
They don't. Large parts of the OS are never used, like 198 of the 200 printer drivers. Many applications are never used. Most localisations in the other apps are never used.
so is that means, if I save a file one time, actually, it was saved 2 times, one to ssd, and one to hard disk? I don't know how it transfer data from ssd to hard disk. is it transfer data directly between ssd and hard disk (something like DMA in cpu's world) or it transfer data via cpu and still need consume main bus band width? if it is second case, it can not be called an innovation.
WTF? It's the same thing that defragmentation and hot zoning already do on any Macintosh. Innovation isn't creating perverted technical solutions for non-problems, innovation is taking what is already available and turning it into something that is actually useful for your customers.
As it was explained in the keynote, this puts whole files on one drive or the other, never across both. Raid0 stripes files across both drives at the bit level, so you could end up with half of each of your files in a drive failure.
In a drive failure with fusion it seems like you would be left with a functioning drive containing the files that were on it at the time of failure.
Keynote = dumbed down for the masses. Phil Schiller also demonstrated how two applications were exchanged - that doesn't happen in real life; one may get moved from SSD to HD, one may get moved from HD to SSD, but it is independent. But swapping Garageband for Numbers makes sense to people. Raid0 is something totally different, and Raid0 with SSD and HD would be a most stupid thing to do.
In case of drive failure, you better have a backup. Just as today. Files may be on the other drive, but you won't be able to read them if the drive with the directory information is dead.
