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

[gnasher729]

Apple has an external Optical drive that can be used to add an optical drive, but in terms of an external Fusion Drive? I think Apple is going to leave that up to the third party drive people like LaCie, Promise, G-Tech, Seagate, Western Digital, etc.

I'm wondering if these Fusion drives would help in a RAID array for the large storage solutions.

All you need is an external case with space for two drives, and the software that is already present in MacOS X. Or a manufacturer could create a RAID-like drive that does exactly the same as the Fusion software does (one SSD and one or two large drives, moving data that is used a lot to the SSD drive).

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I don't have time to read through 150 messages. Is Apple or does Apple have an external Fusion drive for older iMacs? Mine is an i7 27"(2008 I think?). The Superdrive doesn't work anymore so a new option would be nice without having to buy a whole new computer. The i7 seems to be very a good computer and an SSD woul dbe a huge upgrade (is that part of what a fusion drive is?).

Currently you need an SSD drive in your Mac, a hard drive in your Mac, a backup of everything, MacOS X 10.8.2 on a memoy stick, and good nerves to start Terminal on your Mac and type some rather complicated commands on your Mac.

 

[hfg]

All you need is an external case with space for two drives, and the software that is already present in MacOS X. Or a manufacturer could create a RAID-like drive that does exactly the same as the Fusion software does (one SSD and one or two large drives, moving data that is used a lot to the SSD drive).

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Currently you need an SSD drive in your Mac, a hard drive in your Mac, a backup of everything, MacOS X 10.8.2 on a memoy stick, and good nerves to start Terminal on your Mac and type some rather complicated commands on your Mac.

Hmmm ... get one of those closeout ThunderBolt LaCie "Little Big Disks" that are mentioned often on these forums, replace the 2 internal hard disks with a 128GB SSD and a 1 TB hard disk and perform the Fusion join on it. Now you have a portable external "Fusion" disk.

These are SATA-II ... but the price is right! Or you could spend a bunch more and get one of the new SATA-III ones.

Use this as the boot drive on the base iMac and the internal disk can be used for Windows and/or additional non-managed storage.

 

[gnasher729]

Hmmm ... get one of those closeout ThunderBolt LaCie "Little Big Disks" that are mentioned often on these forums, replace the 2 internal hard disks with a 128GB SSD and a 1 TB hard disk and perform the Fusion join on it. Now you have a portable external "Fusion" disk.

These are SATA-II ... but the price is right! Or you could spend a bunch more and get one of the new SATA-III ones.

Found a USB 3.0 dual bay 3.5" case for £66. Supports either RAID or JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks); I would think that Fusion would work with it. It's not quite optimal because moving data between the drives goes forth and back through a single USB connection, but should be faster than a RAID drive with two spinning drives.

 

[I WAS the one]

I'll love to see the first one who get a corrupt file stuck in the middle of the two drives that can't be saved because of this NOT-CALL-IT-RAID-FUSION-DRIVE mutant work of art.

it will be priceless. Even Techtool pro is jumping out.

 

[MacAddict1978]

I agree. I've seen 120-128GB drives on sale quite often at $60-70 mark. I'd imagine Apple can get these at an even cheaper rate. Shipping all Macs with at least Fusion drive would have been a pretty good selling point.

That they took out the optical drive, didn't drop the price (wow, it's thinner...whooo big freaking deal on a desk top), there is no excuse not to have included this. Hell, even if they just tossed in 64gb just to house the os would have been something, with a bto option for larger flash storage...

 

[Yvan256]

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

I'm sorry to learn that the Mac mini is junk, otherwise I wouldn't have used one to earn a living since 2005.

 

[ericinboston]

Rather than Apple offer sizeable SSDs, they spend years of R&D to come up with some crazy hybrid approach which a)is expensive and b)still not better than simply an SSD or multiple SSDs.

Anyone with half a brain that cares about hard drive performance is going to look for an SSD...not some nutty hybrid, proprietary Apple solution of mixed drive speeds and sizes. Yuck!

I can buy NUMEROUS 128GB SSDs at RETAIL price for $90 in the USA. 256GB SSDs are $170. 512GB are unfortunately about $450. You tellin' me Apple couldn't buy these suckers in huge volume and offer them AFFORDABLY (while still making a profit)?

AND...Fusion is only available on the middle-priced $800 Mini for an ADDITIONAL $250. Way to go Apple!!!

 

[ABG]

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

LOL - You obviously don't understand the iMac or Mac Mini target market.

LOL PMSL WTF etc.

You obviously don't know computing moves on and what was fine in 2007 isn't really cutting it now. For a business which pretends it doesn't want to support "old" tech, such as DVDs I'm really getting sick of Apple screwing every last penny out by using the genuinely old tech.

 

[gnasher729]

Rather than Apple offer sizeable SSDs, they spend years of R&D to come up with some crazy hybrid approach which a)is expensive and b)still not better than simply an SSD or multiple SSDs.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Totally, totally wrong.

1. They didn't spend years of R&D. Someone has spent a bit of time on the Core Storage technology, but the real hard bit in Core Storage is Filevault. That's where all the hard work is; the technology for Fusion Drives is actually quite simple once Filevault is done. What Fusion Drive does is actually amazingly simple, it is hard to understand that nobody introduced it earlier.

2. The hybrid approach isn't crazy. Something very similar is in use in every data centre.

3. The cost, once the code is written, is zero. The technology can be deployed elsewhere, anywhere where you have both a small, fast, and a huge, slow storage technology available.

4. It gives you almost the same speed, much larger capacity, and much lower price, compared to multiple SSD drives.

I'll love to see the first one who get a corrupt file stuck in the middle of the two drives that can't be saved because of this NOT-CALL-IT-RAID-FUSION-DRIVE mutant work of art.

it will be priceless. Even Techtool pro is jumping out.

This technology is simple compared to Filevault. And Filevault works just fine. Don't worry.

 

[Small White Car]

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.

No, what I'm asking for is a setting in Aperture's preferences that let me tell the computer that Aperture matters more to me if I'm a pro photographer or maybe I can tell it that XCode matters more to me if I'm a developer.

It would still handle everything automatically, but the computer then knows what I care about the most and prioritizes it.

There's nothing like that currently.

 

[applefan69]

I agree. I've seen 120-128GB drives on sale quite often at $60-70 mark. I'd imagine Apple can get these at an even cheaper rate. Shipping all Macs with at least Fusion drive would have been a pretty good selling point.

After reading this, I cannot believe Apple did not do what you suggested.

Really they missed a serious selling angle.

Owning a mac is all about having something superior to the competition, or at least it used to be.

It would of been a big attention grabber that left competitors going "huh, whoops?"

Let alone the genuine speed improvements that come with use of the fusion drive, it would of made macs a genuinely superior computer again, not just an expensive piece of eye candy.

But no they decided to cash cow it to maximize revenues. As a business student, I can understand that if you can charge for something, you might as well. No reason to give something for free. But on the other hand its been a while since apple actually "wowed" me.


tldr I am not saying apple products are not good or that they do not work. Just saying there seems to be a lack of the "wow" factor lately, and surprise fusion drive in every mac could of been it.

 

[justreturned]

Hard drive spin down

Is the spinning hard drive in a fusion drive automatically spinning down if only data on the SSD is used? Is the system capable of deciding when the HDD can be spun down?

Curious to know, as currently I am using a two-drive setup on my Mac which allows me to mount the HDD only when needed and to unmount it otherwise in order to save power and to enjoy a perfectly silent system.

 

[SeaFox]

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

LOL - You obviously don't understand the iMac or Mac Mini target market.

Maybe his real issue is Apple doesn't have a machine targeted to the propeller-head geek. Namely, the expandable mini-tower machine people have been asking for for what, five years at least now?

And before you say "Mac Pro", consider the reason the creative market isn't interested in it. The same reasons turn off the geek market, too.

 

[iGrip]

I'm sorry to learn that the Mac mini is junk, otherwise I wouldn't have used one to earn a living since 2005.

Well, look on the bright side - now you know.

 

[Eidorian]

And my Time Machine backup is suddenly working again...maybe it was the last restart from Software Update.

 

[deconstruct60]

No, what I'm asking for is a setting in Aperture's preferences that let me tell the computer that Aperture matters more to me if I'm a pro photographer ...

If you are using (reading/writing) Aperture data you are telling it.

What somewhat asking for here is for something in Aperture to tell the OS/CoreStorage to ingnore what other programs are doing even if Aperture has been idle a long time. That is a prescription for bad outcomes. It isn't optimizing Aperture. It is deoptimizing everything else and running contradictory to what the users is actually doing.

It would still handle everything automatically, but the computer then knows what I care about the most and prioritizes it.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil " -- Donald Knuth.

If you stop using Aperture for a day or two in order to do something else then is it really your priority? Workload priorities shift over time. Dynamically adjusting to exactly what people are using will get more optimal results over time than getting all twisted over reloading the photos you abandoned two days ago into memory faster.

 

[bruinsrme]

So when you install these in the mac mini, do you get to use "fusion drive"? How easy is it to add a drive to the mini? I replaced the HD in my iMac.. that kind of sucked but was doable.

I didn't get the fusion drive. To me it wasn't worth the $250.

Two days I replaced the drive in a Mac mini 2010. Took me about 1.5 hours, this was the first time I did anything with a mini and I had issues with the Sata connections which required a disassembly and reconnection.

The newer minis require a little bit more. I purchased the dual drive kit for owc.

Again it being the first time I did anything with the newer mini the install was a little more complex. It took about 2.5 hours, taking my time.
If it took me 8 hours, I wouldn't have minded. It was the first time in a while I have been able to tinker with anything.

Ram upgrade was $81 for 16 gig, far cry from the additional $219 apple tax.

If I had no desire to tear it apart and do the install I think the fusion drive seems to be a decent deal, more so than the ram prices.

 

[hfg]

Has anyone noticed if using a Fusion drive causes increased activity with Time Machine backups due to the managed data being moved between the physical drives?

 

[anthony11]

Yeah, my Time Machine drive just decided to weird out and all I can do is read the logs with arcane error codes to try to resolve it. I have not made a backup in 30 days in Time Machine.

TM has weirded out on me more than once, though it's better now without a SL client. Not putting *anything* else on the TM drive seems to help it keep its **** together.

I suggest a local TM backup for the speed of access, and a CrashPlan remote for confidence.

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I'm less excited about this for me than I am for friends and family who ask me what computer to buy.

I've felt downright terrible telling them to not buy SSD drives recently, but I just don't want to get into helping them all with moving iTunes and iPhoto libraries to external drives and advising them on how to put large files on the external drive and not on the Desktop or in the Documents folder and then having to help fix it when they forget the rules and clog up their boot drive.

I hear you -- as time has gone by the complexity I'm willing to drop on unsophisticated users has decreased steadily. With a 256GB SSD, though, I should think that that class of user should have plenty of room. They're going to be shooting JPEG photos, which are tiny, and probably have at most a few GB in iTunes.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

The iMac isn't better designed than the Mini (the new iMac is a severe candidate for heat issues, it lacks pure SSD except the 768GB option -which looks like a joke-, and it doesn't come with a Retina display either).

And the Mac Pro is way old, and waiting for a very needed redesign.

Conclusion: If the Mac Mini is junk, all the current Mac line is junk in this moment.

On the other hand, if the Mini allowed a good GPU, it would be the top of the line Mac, with unbeatable features, at an incredible price.

Just imagine:

4-core i7 at 2.6GHz
16 GB RAM
256 GB SSD (you can add an external USB 3 HDD if you wish)
2 GB GeForce GTX 680MX

If you take a look at current official Apple Mac Mini prices, it's clear Apple could offer this configuration for about 2000 euro. No competition, a great price for a real killer machine.

In other words, the only (I mean the only) thing the Mini needs to be the best and more powerful Mac in town is just a 2 GB GeForce GTX 680MX. Add that, and you get the best Mac ever produced. Period.

Hardly. The Mac mini doesn't hold a candle to the 12 core Mac Pro with up to 64GB of ECC RAM.

 

[Small White Car]

If you stop using Aperture for a day or two in order to do something else then is it really your priority? Workload priorities shift over time.

The problem is that something like Aperture doesn't work with one file at a time (like, say, Photoshop or Excel) but rather lets me work with entire libraries at the same time.

If I've done a huge photo shoot and I've been working on half the photos, trying to scroll back and forth past the other 50% that have been moved to the hard drive will slow everything down.

I really need entire jobs to stay on the SSD, even if I've only been focusing on my favorite shots and haven't been touching every single one.

It would be nice if I could be sure of that is all I'm saying.

 

[ConCat]

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!"

That, and there has to be a way to get it to understand things like games. Lets say you have a rarely played game sitting somewhere on your computer. Chances are it'll be bumped to the HDD. When you do play it, expect horrible load times on that 5400 RPM drive. This tech is a work in progress.

Currently you need an SSD drive in your Mac, a hard drive in your Mac, a backup of everything, MacOS X 10.8.2 on a memoy stick, and good nerves to start Terminal on your Mac and type some rather complicated commands on your Mac.

Not entirely accurate. Because of the way the recovery partition works, you are able to use it to convert your main disk (the one with the recovery partition on it) and another into Core Storage logical volumes, and make a fusion drive that way. No third disk needed. I've done this in fact. The caveat is that when you reboot, you wont have a recovery partition if anything goes wrong. Thank goodness for internet recovery.

Is the spinning hard drive in a fusion drive automatically spinning down if only data on the SSD is used? Is the system capable of deciding when the HDD can be spun down?

Curious to know, as currently I am using a two-drive setup on my Mac which allows me to mount the HDD only when needed and to unmount it otherwise in order to save power and to enjoy a perfectly silent system.

Don't know for certain, but I'd say most likely yes. The system clearly knows when data is and isn't being written to or read from the HDD, and that's all it needs to know to determine when to spin up and spin down the drive. Lets just say I find it hard to believe they wouldn't have thought of that minor detail.

 

[faroZ06]

Rather than Apple offer sizeable SSDs, they spend years of R&D to come up with some crazy hybrid approach which a)is expensive and b)still not better than simply an SSD or multiple SSDs.

Anyone with half a brain that cares about hard drive performance is going to look for an SSD...not some nutty hybrid, proprietary Apple solution of mixed drive speeds and sizes. Yuck!

I can buy NUMEROUS 128GB SSDs at RETAIL price for $90 in the USA. 256GB SSDs are $170. 512GB are unfortunately about $450. You tellin' me Apple couldn't buy these suckers in huge volume and offer them AFFORDABLY (while still making a profit)?

AND...Fusion is only available on the middle-priced $800 Mini for an ADDITIONAL $250. Way to go Apple!!!

It's still cheaper to buy a Fusion drive than to buy enough SSDs to equal the Fusion drive in capacity (and many Macs can only hold 1 drive). And Fusion drives, as others have said, don't require much R&D. I could even set up my Mac Pro to have a "Fusion drive" if I put an SSD in one of the hard drive bays.

The extra cost of the Fusion drive is just Apple charging extra for parts, enough to make it still worth it but more expensive than it should be. It's like how they charge way extra for more RAM. And, yeah, it's annoying.

 

[deconstruct60]

The problem is that something like Aperture doesn't work with one file at a time (like, say, Photoshop or Excel) but rather lets me work with entire libraries at the same time.

If I've done a huge photo shoot and I've been working on half the photos, trying to scroll back and forth past the other 50% that have been moved to the hard drive will slow everything down.

You are confusing implementation with infrastructure.

1. If your libraries are bigger than the SSD drive even if you could say "pin this app's data" it won't matter. It is too big. End of story.


2. there is no material difference in Aperture parallel updating of metadata or standard set of filters being applied to a whole library and single file access. It all goes through OS block access interface which goes through CoreStorage for the Fusion Drive.

In fact, if some files are on the SSD and some are on the HDD you will get more parallelism through the I/O channels in Fusion than you would through a single drive. This is exactly illustrative of why premature optimization often is misguided.


3. if you have done a large photo shoot when you offload the photos from the SDHC/CF card Fusion will keep at least 4GB of that on the SSD. If you open up the other files it will move them over as you work on them.

However, the metadata that Aperture uses will likely already be on the SSD drive or at least the indexes into that data.

I really need entire jobs to stay on the SSD, even if I've only been focusing on my favorite shots and haven't been touching every single one.

There is probably a deeper UI responsiveness need for the thumbnails and metadata of the whole job to stick around either in Aperture (cached in memory ) or on the SSD; not the whole project in its entirety. Streaming a single un-fragmented file off the HDD ( after selecting it in Aperture) won't take too long if the HDD is not busy doing other stuff concurrently. There is typically a huge difference between HDDs sequential and random I/O data rates. Just taking the effective random I/O (multiple requests to different locations ) away from the HDD will speed it up.


Implementation wise Apple's 128+1TB configuration wise might be a bad fit. Your workload may work better on a larger SSD ratio if the "job" libraries run 80-200GB big.

 

[deconstruct60]

Has anyone noticed if using a Fusion drive causes increased activity with Time Machine backups due to the managed data being moved between the physical drives?

Time Machine shouldn't be able to tell the difference between where the blocks are stored. 'above' CoreStorage (where TM is) this volume presents a opaque block device just like any other storage disk.