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

gnasher729 said:
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.
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Not really. All Filevault is simply encrypting the block before it is written to disk. With AES instructions built into the CPU these days that isn't particularly hard at all.

The hard part was building the CoreStorage infrastructure. Once they had a solid infrastructure it is straightforward to do incremental things with the blocks like moving them ( Fusion Drive ) or encrypting them .
 
Curious, I read through the thread and someone mentioned terminal code necessary in 10.8.2 to replicate "Fusion Drive". I have a 256GB SSD on my Mac Pro, and frankly I have plenty of room but am just curious as to what code is necessary to engage this in 10.8.2 with a SSD and HDD combo. Thanks! Good stuff. :)
 
I understand product differentiation and all, but Apple refusal to include a 3TB Fusion Drive option on the mid-range Mac Mini is very frustrating. iMac 27" is still the only that is getting love....
 
hleewell said:
I understand product differentiation and all, but Apple refusal to include a 3TB Fusion Drive option on the mid-range Mac Mini is very frustrating. iMac 27" is still the only that is getting love....
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A Mac mini can't take a 3.5" drive, which is what the 3TB drive is, and there is no such thing as a 2.5" 3TB drive, for starters.
 
JonasCalhoun said:
Huh? Got a link? I'd like to know more about this...

Thanks,
Dan
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Not off hand... After I upgraded my MBP and my daughter's MBP we both began to have issue backing up to timecapsule... My wife's macbook which is still on lion had no issues. After much research and trying a bunch of different things, I came across a post that suggested that if the password to the user account on the computer and the password on the timecapsule were the same it would have issues... this turned out to fix my problems because the passwords were indeed all the same.
 
abbstrack said:
actually finally solved by attempting to create a third partition. It ultimately ended up merging with the unaccessible "free space" portion of the drive to become another 2nd partition, then i went into recovery mode and deleted that partion to get my full 1.1TB single partition drive back that I started with.

a very roundabout way of fixing a problem that vexed me for pretty much all of yesterday.
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Glad to see you got it squared away. They do need to make that kind of change seamless in Disk Utilities. Maybe that's why Fusion Drive is optional on current Macs this go-around?

Although, I thought I just read that that the underlying software for FD has been built in to OSX since Lion. So that should've been time enough to test basic disk partitioning issues.
 
I guess for the buy-it-and-use-it-until-it-breaks crowd Fusion is a good idea. For the upgrade-as-newer-and-better-hard-drives-are-released folks it is not such a good idea.

I find myself in the latter group while Apple prefers marketing products to the former.
 
Excellent idea

Six years ago, when I was still a windows user, and had my Vaio TZ computer, that came with a 64 Gb SSD and 320 Gb HDD, I said to myself, what an excellent idea; having a fast SSD for the OS and programs and conventional HDD for storage. Shortly after I abandoned Windows forever and became a Mac user, I waited for Apple to come up with a technology to embrace the speed of the SSD with the low cost of the conventional HDD. I had to wait for six years, but finally it is here as the Fusion Drive. Oh by the way, I have two Mac Mini Servers, both with an SSD and an HDD. I know my way around to symlink my iTunes and my media library to make a smaller SSD to work with a big HDD to make the best of both worlds. So, when I see that this is available to the masses with no fuss and muss, I see this as progress.
 
hleewell said:
My question is: Does Fusion Drive work like the Seagate Momentus Hybrid Drive?
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Better. It's doing tiering and not caching so you're not writing the same data to both HDD and SSD. You also get a LOT more SSD storage.

scottsjack said:
I guess for the buy-it-and-use-it-until-it-breaks crowd Fusion is a good idea. For the upgrade-as-newer-and-better-hard-drives-are-released folks it is not such a good idea.

I find myself in the latter group while Apple prefers marketing products to the former.
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With the advent of USB 3 and Thunderbolt the need for internal drive expansion for me is limited.
 
bingeciren said:
. I had to wait for six years, but finally it is here as the Fusion Drive. Oh by the way, I have two Mac Mini Servers, both with an SSD and an HDD. I know my way around to symlink my iTunes and my media library to make a smaller SSD to work with a big HDD to make the best of both worlds. So, when I see that this is available to the masses with no fuss and muss, I see this as progress.
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Yea, I love this hybrid system like everybody in this forum, but too bad Apple won't give Mac Mini users the option to upgrade Fusion Drive to 3TB.

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monokitty said:
A Mac mini can't take a 3.5" drive, which is what the 3TB drive is, and there is no such thing as a 2.5" 3TB drive, for starters.
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Well, they could have made the Mini a little thicker to accommodate desktop size HDD, can't they? The Mini is such a useful, portable device. It doesn't need to be super thin. Anyway, HDD is getting thinner. There will be a 3TB HDD with 9.5mm thickness. Either Samsung or Hitachi would eventually get around to it in near future.

They could have made Mac Mini in such a way so that the HDD bay is removable. I missed my Fujitsu laptop which can be ordered to take in a 2ndary HDD, or an extra battery instead of a DVD drive.
 
hleewell said:
Yea, I love this hybrid system like everybody in this forum, but too bad Apple won't give Mac Mini users the option to upgrade Fusion Drive to 3TB.
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It is not Apple's fault. No 3 Gb drive that fits into a Mac Mini exist yet, The biggest 2.5" drive is 750 Gb so far. So, the biggest Fusion Drive you can have is a 500 Gb SSD and a 750Gb HDD, which makes a 1.25 Gb FD in total.;)
 
deconstruct60 said:
Not really. All Filevault is simply encrypting the block before it is written to disk. With AES instructions built into the CPU these days that isn't particularly hard at all.

The hard part was building the CoreStorage infrastructure. Once they had a solid infrastructure it is straightforward to do incremental things with the blocks like moving them ( Fusion Drive ) or encrypting them .
Click to expand...

Since Filevault needs the full CoreStorage infrastructure (and Filevault does a lot more than just encrypting, in order to guarantee that your data is safe if the computer crashes in the middle of an encrypting operation), what I say is correct: Fusion didn't require that much development effort.


bingeciren said:
It is not Apple's fault. No 3 Gb drive that fits into a Mac Mini exist yet, The biggest 2.5" drive is 750 Gb so far. So, the biggest Fusion Drive you can have is a 500 Gb SSD and a 750Gb HDD, which makes a 1.25 Gb FD in total.;)
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The biggest 12mm 7200 rpm drive is 750 GB. I have a 1 TB drive in my MBP, and there are 1.5 TB 15mm high drives. Don't know if they fit in a Mini, but they are 2.5 inch.


John.B said:
Although, I thought I just read that that the underlying software for FD has been built in to OSX since Lion. So that should've been time enough to test basic disk partitioning issues.
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Part of the underlying software is in Lion, but the actual Fusion Drive software has been added in 10.8.2. (Macs with 10.8.2 can access Fusion Drive on a new Mac in target disk mode).
 
hleewell said:
My question is: Does Fusion Drive work like the Seagate Momentus Hybrid Drive?
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No. The Seagate has a built-in 4GB SSD that is only used to cache writes to the HDD. Fusion drive uses the same 4GB cache, but uses the remainder of the 128GB SSD as actual storage for OS, apps, etc.

bingeciren said:
It is not Apple's fault. No 3 Gb drive that fits into a Mac Mini exist yet, The biggest 2.5" drive is 750 Gb so far. So, the biggest Fusion Drive you can have is a 500 Gb SSD and a 750Gb HDD, which makes a 1.25 Gb FD in total.;)
Click to expand...

There are now 1GB 2.5" form factor HDDs. 5400 RPM, but because of the higher densities they actually perform better than the older 7200 rpm drives (and run cooler).

hothardware.com/Reviews/1TB-WD-Scorpio-Blue-25-HD-QuickTake/
 
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gnasher729 said:
Since Filevault needs the full CoreStorage infrastructure (and Filevault does a lot more than just encrypting, in order to guarantee that your data is safe if the computer crashes in the middle of an encrypting operation), what I say is correct: Fusion didn't require that much development effort.
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No. If you are referring to the transitional stage where Filevault is encrypting a clear volume blocks into a encrypted blocks that is still CoreStore not particularly FileVaut. Same infrastructure transactionally moves blocks between disks or between states.

If you are trying to assert that data is somehow safe with Filevault2 in the event of sudden crash. No, it isn't. If there is a crash there is no cleartext, unencrypted, version on the disk. So therefore the data is lost just like as if you hadn't encrypted it.

FileVault is simpler (it involves only one device). It is evidenced by the fact that it was released first due to its slightly lower complexity.

I think your unsupported assertion is that the CoreStorage infrastructure was created with just FileVault in mind. I suspect that is deeply flawed. Apple probably always was moving toward a volume manager. Probably started either before or during the time they walked away from ZFS ( and its volume management capabilities ).

The Volume Management stuff worked back in Lion.

This article written in August of 2011. A year before Fusion Drive:
"... A volume manager brings storage virtualization to an operating system, allowing storage capacity efficiently to be managed and manipulated. But all this has changed in Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” with CoreStorage. ... "
http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/04/mac-osx-lion-corestorage-volume-manager/

And in ArsTechnica's in depth Lion Review

" ... Nevertheless, there are some file system changes in Lion—some significant ones, in fact. The biggest is the introduction of Apple's first real crack at creating a logical volume manager: Core Storage. ...
...
File System Future ...
... Core Storage is probably the most significant file system change in the history of Mac OS X. Let's think about what it does. Core Storage is responsible for managing the chunks of data that make up the individual logical volumes on a disk. To do so, presumably it has a set of metadata structures for tracking allocated and free space and for remembering which chunks belong to which volumes. ... "
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/13/#lion-file-system

Again all written in 2011. A whole year before the appearance of Fusion Drive.

Apple rolled it out very conservatively to general end users. The simpler Filevault2 first and now Fusion Drive. CoreStorage is the infrastructure underneath both. If you look at the man page for diskutil encryption is just another flag on create. You can encrypt the Fusion Drive volume also.
 
I am sticking with my 7200 rpm, 500 gig hard drive in my 2010 iMac until it dies or I run out of room. Still have over 300 gigs available so I've done a decent job of not using too much storage so far. Can't wait to start taking advantage of SSD though.
 
Are there instructions to set up this fusion drive concept on Macbook Pro with an Optibay + SSD set up?
 
mslide said:
Yes, SSDs are fast. We've known this for years. You don't need a "Fusion Drive" to have fast boot times and application loading.

It's still pathetic that most Apple computers ship with a spinning HD as standard. SSDs should be standard in everything now.
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Well said!
For a company all about innovation and thinking different they said that optical drives are dead and obsolete... what about HDD?
 
iGrip said:
Tell your family that you have a solution for their problem, and that all your excessive "stuff" is going into a little magic box where they will never be concerned with it again.
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hehe. I'm with you there. The storage definitely isn't an issue. It's much more practical than a dozen albums of photos that rarely (never) get pulled out
 
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dearlaserworks said:
Right, 15mm thick, which is too thick for most laptops and perhaps too thick for the new 21" iMac.
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15mm is a standard thickness - it would be smart engineering for Apple to allow for 15mm drives in the Imac.

And the earlier post didn't qualify the statement by thickness - and this is definitely a 2 TB drive that's 2.5".
 
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