Apple's Fusion Drive: Faster Performance in a Simple Consumer-Focused Package

[SeattleMoose]

It's best to judge this build after having had used it. It does seem to be on the slow side. But would Apple make junk?

Besides, sometimes slower is actually faster:

http://blog.macsales.com/11825-when-slower-is-actually-faster

Awww there you go, ruining the blog with facts, science, and ACTUAL MEASUREMENTS which prove that today's 5400 HDs are faster than yesterday's 7200 HDs. Well I for one am going to ignore the truth and continue to whine like a spoiled gamer boy about the "whimpy 5400 HD".....Waaahhhh! Waaaahhhh!!!

 

[boazjoe]

Can I place a fusion drive in last year's i7 imac?

 

[Santabean2000]

They make 2.5" 7200rpm laptop drives.

But only up to 750GB (currently), which is why I think they had to drop to 5400rpm to hit the desired 1Tb capacity.

Extra 250GB > extra spindle speed

----------

Maybe not true. I definitely noticed the speed difference when I replace the 5400 RPM drives in my MBP and mini with 7200RPM models.

The fact that you are doing surgery on your mini, know that what the rpm means and are on this forum clearly distinguishes you from Joe Average.

Not denying that 7200rpm drives are faster (usually), but just that most average Joes don't. But they might notice the storage capacity difference.

 

[ThisIsNotMe]

Well, being that the iMac in so many ways IS the fastest Mac solution you can buy, and the Mac market in general is the market of professional designers, video editors, etc. YOU obviously don't understand the market. The iMac is for the time being until Apple actually decides there will be another desktop called PRO, their professional face.

But that said, professionals don't actually care how big the internal is, or how fast. It's pretty silly to rely on an internal drive for speed or data reliance. You need a raid for either. A raid 5 is a good start. Or if you're just worried about data backup then a mirrored raid is simple enough.

Thats the point. Pros are going to stick with a stock 5,400 RPM drive to being with.

 

[shansoft]

Isn't this just the same as Seagate's Momentus XT?

 

[thefourthpope]

Slow for what, browsing the internet, writing the occasional word file, having a medium sized iPhoto/iTunes library?

I'm genuinely curious what a medium sized iPhoto/iTunes library is. My family keeps telling me I have too many pics and too much music. ~ 95GB of the former, ~130GB of the latter. What do you think: low, mid, high?
All the articles I can find reference services like TuneUp, whose users will necessarily have larger collections than the average.

----------

It's best to judge this build after having had used it. It does seem to be on the slow side. But would Apple make junk?

Besides, sometimes slower is actually faster:

http://blog.macsales.com/11825-when-slower-is-actually-faster

Great link. Thanks!

 

[MacDav]

i love the fusion drive.

tmi

 

[MacDav]

It's best to judge this build after having had used it. It does seem to be on the slow side. But would Apple make junk?

Besides, sometimes slower is actually faster:

http://blog.macsales.com/11825-when-slower-is-actually-faster

Yeah, that was fun to read. While it is very true, it doesn't mention that todays 7200RPM drives also have better bit density. So they are still a lot faster than todays 5400 drives. Granted most users will be more than happy with a 5400 drive. More advanced users want all the speed they can get. I am one of those.

 

[dempson]

With the new shrunk iMac internals, am I right in thinking that the 5400rpm drive is due to it being downsized to a 2.5" laptop HDD vs the previous 7200rpm 3.5" HDD?

I'm thinking that Joe Average would not see a big speed did between 5400 v 7200, but they would notice a drop in capacity to just 750GB.

That's my take on it. The 21.5" iMac only offers 5400 rpm drives with maximum capacity of 1 TB, which fits with available 2.5" mechanisms. There aren't any 7200 rpm 1 TB drives available yet so Apple had to drop to the lower speed to maintain the 1 TB capacity.

If they were 3.5" mechanisms they would be 7200 rpm.

The 27" iMac is offering drive capacities up to 3 TB and 7200 rpm, which must be 3.5".

Therefore with the body redesign of the 2012 iMac, the 21.5" model is thinner than the 27" model.

There will probably be 7200 rpm 1 TB drives next year so in the next revision of the iMac, Apple could do something like standardise on 1 TB 7200 rpm and offer 2 TB 5400 rpm as an option (for example), with a wider range of Fusion and SSD options.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Show me the GPGPU benchmarks.

Stop talking about the CPU. Each generation always improves upon the prior one.

Show me the performance of the Intel 4000HD vs. Nvidia 650M never mind the AMD 7700M series or better yet the prior AMD 6630M series for Mac Mini with its paltry 256MB of GDDR5 RAM.

I'd love to see those performance numbers.

 

[JonasCalhoun]

Tip: if your password to the tm hard drive is the same as the password to your computer bad things happen if running Mountain Lion.

Huh? Got a link? I'd like to know more about this...

Thanks,
Dan

 

[Amazing Iceman]

Are you surprised? The Mini is junk. Pure and simple.

I was hoping the Mini got evolved into a better Mac, but I was wrong.

The odd part is that if you add the price of a Mini to the price of an Apple display, and you get the price of an iMac. It just bothers me the crappy video card.

And I don't really want an iMac because it's so hard to self-service it. Unless the new slim iMac is much better, I'm afraid of breaking the glass when trying to open it.

If I was in the same position as a few years ago, I would have purchased a Mac Pro, except that I would wait for a refresh. At least I could upgrade and service myself if necessary.

Well... decisions, decisions.

 

[Pakaku]

While the Fusion Drive is certainly a fast option, i think everybody is forgetting that the iMac and the Mac Mini do not come with this option by default. It is a £200 upgrade. And what's more, the drive that it DOES come with (even the high spec iMacs come with this drive by default) is a pathetically slow (as we can see in the video on this article) 5400rpm drive. Apple should have put a 128gb SSD in the iMacs at least by default, but instead they've actually put in a drive that's a lot slower than the model it replaced. I'm not paying £200 extra on top of the already overpriced iMac to get a drive that performs the way a 2012 iMac should do. Sorry rant over.

I thought the entire point was everything would be accessed through the SSD part, and everything else not in use would stay on the hard-drive. So that would mean the hard-drive spin speed would be irrelevant, wouldn't it?

If this has been brought up, sorry, I don't feel like reading 100 comments

 

[John.B]

It only took me 3 days to break fusion drive.

I bought a quad core i7 2.6ghz with 1TB + Fusion Drive which I've been using since it landed on Tuesday.

I created a 200GB partition in disk utility to store my photo (aperture/lightroom) libraries on, then after realizing I dont necessarily need to partition since my internal drive is so large, i tried deleting the partition using disk utility. Well that somehow must have thrown fusion drive into a tizzy, because I got an error message that I can not delete a boot partition (this wasnt a boot partition) and now I am unable to recover the free space that is left (the partition was indeed deleted, and I am now left with 291GB [where did the extra 91gb come from, my guess is Fusion Drive] of unusable, unaccessible, un-deletable free space).

If it's so sensitive to user action, perhaps disk utility should either be disabled, or come with some severe warnings that it may affect the performance of fusion drive.

crap.

Can't you clone your existing Fusion drive to an external drive, boot from the external drive and repartition the internal Fusion drive from there? Then clone the external back to the internal Fusion drive?

 

[herr_neumann]

I'm genuinely curious what a medium sized iPhoto/iTunes library is. My family keeps telling me I have too many pics and too much music. ~ 95GB of the former, ~130GB of the latter. What do you think: low, mid, high?


----------

I have ~86 GB of Photos, ~400GB Music

 

[turtlez]

wow 5400 vs ssd what a great review!

haha that is what I was thinking. There is no real way to test Fusion until you fill up the computer with a bunch of stuff, not just fresh installs

 

[John.B]

Isn't this just the same as Seagate's Momentus XT?

Not really.

The Momentus XT caches 4 GB of data before writing to the HDD, but all data is persisted on the HDD. It's managed by the hardware on the drive itself.

The Fusion drive also caches 4 GB of data before writing to the HDD, but the remainder of the 128 GB SSD is available to host files and folder like any other SSD. It's managed by the OS.

Exactly which files and folders permanently stay on the SSD and which can be moved off to the HDD is currently the $64K question.

www.anandtech.com/show/6406/understanding-apples-fusion-drive

 

[thekev]

There will be no refresh. The only thing they will refresh from here on out is the Retina models. And the Retina's are too thin for a HDD.

I disagree with you here. Apple has maintained an $1800 15" model. If they can't get the rMBP to that starting price point, they're likely to continue the classic model.

This is clearly a good way of doing things. Apple needs to pounce. The other guys don't have it yet. Apple can make power and performance its signature in laptops if it does that.

This tech needs to be in the rMBP ASAP.

I don't know how you'd fit it in that form factor.

 

[SchneiderMan]

Fusion Drive = True SSD performance with tons of storage. Incredible Apple!

 

[sargedessy]

Only when you could buy a 1TB SSD for 90 bucks.

----------

I am using my i7 2.6 Fusion drive Mac Mini. It flys everything is super snappy.

----------



Junk how? Its a bad ass miniature powerhouse. Tiny, silent and fast as heck and consumes little power. I do quite a bit on it and it has no performance issues. Loads up my Trading software lightning fast,crunches through multiple (Complex Order books,etc.. like a hot knife on butter) I got A bunch of applications,trading software,etc.. even an Ubuntu Virtual running all fast.

Also I have a Million windows open and animations are smooth as butter when using my magic trackpad to manipulate stuff.

So far 5 days 4h runtime on this sucker. (would have been much longer but had to shut down to move power cable)

Hi, you trade on a mac?

What broker offers their trading platform for macs with a proper news feed and affordable charting solutions? I'm looking at for a forex as well as futures trading software. One of the best platform I have seen that runs on a mac is thinkorswim.

 

[DayBowBow]

Knowledge is power!

Make you own fusion drive with 10.8.2, whatever SSD/HD combo you have, and some terminal commands.

Works on regular macs and hackintoshes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_odnNpv-FQ&feature=player_embedded

http://www.tonymacx86.com/mountain-lion-desktop-guides/78409-create-fusion-drive-your-customac.html

 

[macs4nw]

I love the idea of Fusion Drive, but for me -- the propeller-headed geek who does symlink stuff -- I'd like the 768GB SSD + 3TB HDD option to be available in the new iMac.

If all that FUSION tech works as advertised, that would be one awesome machine! Because my only concern with the 128GB SSD + HD Fusion Drive that's going to be available as a BTO, on all but the basic new iMacs, would be that SSD's slow down over time, a well documented fact, and I read somewhere, some months ago that APPLE was working on some software based solution to this problem, something beyond the TRIM option. Can anyone enlighten us about this?

Just had a thought, but I'd love to see apps become "Fusion aware" in the future. (Just like how now some apps take more advantage of multiple cores than they otherwise might.) For example, I'd love to hear that something like Aperture could be made to keep this month's imported photos on the SSD no matter what and then move all others to the HD. Whereas the OS might think "oh, he only edited half of these photos, I'll move the rest to the HD" it would be great if an App could override that and say "nope, he told me keep ALL of this month's photos ready on the SSD for when he needs to work!"

I hear what you're saying, but that would not only basically defeat FUSION's purpose of quietly doing all this magic in the background, without user input, (just like Time Machine Back-ups), but would probably also require a larger SSD. Remember, everything is initially written to the SSD, and then by some usage algorithm, moved over to the HDD, or back again.

Bring the Fusion Drive with SSD & 7200 RPM HD.

According to the APPLE website, the new 27" iMacs with or without FUSION, will be shipped with 7200 rpm HDD's.

According to Lee over at Ars Fusion is a block based tiering set-up, meaning what you are asking for is likely happening. Remember this isn’t a caching scheme, this is two hard drives acting as a single volume. OS X already moves files around on your disk based on how frequently they’re accessed. This takes that concept to the next level.

Yes! It's really the best of both worlds. It's (again) a very elegant solution to a common problem, the beauty of which is the fact that all this 'magic' works invisibly in the background, without any settings, configurations or other user input to complicate things.

 

[karsten]

i haven't seen this mentioned any where but what about the increased use of the SSD as a write cache negatively impacting its lifespan?

 

[macs4nw]

i haven't seen this mentioned any where but what about the increased use of the SSD as a write cache negatively impacting its lifespan?

Enabling the 'TRIM' option, is a partial solution to that problem. See my other post, above, and/or check out this site; it has a pretty good explanation of the workings of SSD's. http://lifehacker.com/5932009/the-complete-guide-to-solid+state-drives

 

[karsten]

Enabling the 'TRIM' option, is a partial solution to that problem. See my other post, above, and/or check out this site; it has a pretty good explanation of the workings of SSD's. http://lifehacker.com/5932009/the-complete-guide-to-solid+state-drives

i'm not referring to trim slowdowns but rather the limited write-cycles available to all SSDs. fusion drive seems like it would put undue stress on the drive.