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Apple's New 'Fusion Drive' Not a Typical Hybrid Drive
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uhhh because theyre doing it built into Mac OS X and not a mainframe? maybe? ideas are cheap and plentiful. innovation is what happens when you actually implement ideas into products.
that is EXACTLY what happens. i cant tell you the number of mom-and-pop clone PCs ive examined that have a 100% boot volume and a near-empty second volume.
you are assuming that normal people are like computer nerds. they arent.
Actually, you are wrong. Caching is complicated. That's why why the Seagate Momentum only uses the flash as a read cache. The problem is that whenever it writes, it has to check whether the data written is in the read cache, and either invalidate the read cache or make two copies. It's complicated. And that's for a read cache; a read/write cache is much more complicated.
What Apple does is two things: First, treat SSD and spinning hard drive as one item. That is actually very simple to do. If they did nothing more, then whatever happens to be in the first 128 GB by coincidence would be fast, and whatever is in the rest would be slower. Second, move data to a "better" place from time to time. That is something that is done already: There is automatic defragmenting which combines pieces of fragmented files together, and there is hotzoning which moves heavily used items to the start of the drive (on a spinning hard drive, the first tracks are faster than the last ones).
So one very simple change that doesn't cause any problems, plus a slight modification to algorithms that are already in place. That's exactly the right thing to do.
No, what Apple is doing is actually very, very simple, and it is amazing that nobody did it earlier.
no, its reducing the probability of data loss compared to a single 1TB drive because you have your data in one of two possible volumes.
and if you backup properly, then the probability of data loss is exactly the same as a single volume solution.
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except that its not, and it will.
This may have been asked, but are there any plans to sell this separately for Late-2011 15" MacBook Pro's? I'm looking to upgrade to an SSD soon and this would be a MUCH better option as opposed to an expensive large SSD.
I don't know what Apple does, I know what I would do: Every drive is partitioned anyway. Usually it starts with a tiny boot partition, a huge Mac partition, and a small recovery partition. With Bootcamp, the Mac partition is smaller, and you have a Windows partition. And Windows will ignore the Mac partition, because it can't read it.
With a Fusion Drive, the SSD has a partition that is not a Mac partition, but a boot partition, followed by special partition "Part 1 of Mac partition", followed by the recovery partition. And the spinning drive starts with a special "Part 2 of Mac partition", followed by the Windows partition.
No its not. As soon as you combine two devices you get an overall MTBF that is lower than the lowest one. In the simplest case, 2 50000hr MTBF devices become one 25000hr MTBF volume.
This is actually not needed if apple went with 256GB as standard
Sure it would be. Because with 256GB as standard, you'd still be missing 2/3rds of a TB.
As long as you have more of anything (1 device larger capacity, or 2 devices with smaller capacity), the potential failure rate will increase. Why not just stick with 16KB like in the 1980s ?
MTBF of commodity devices are generally good enough even if you use multiple of them. The Anobit technology and workhorse OS + HDD technologies will help workaround failures anyway.
i have two questions:
considering there will be an ssd and a hdd for forming the fusion, there will be 2 sata slots, or 1 for hd, and the ssd will have special connectors like in air's?
if there will be 2 sata slots, theorically its enough to add a 3rd party ssd to the second slot, to create the fusion right?
considering there will be an ssd and a hdd for forming the fusion, there will be 2 sata slots, or 1 for hd, and the ssd will have special connectors like in air's?
if there will be 2 sata slots, theorically its enough to add a 3rd party ssd to the second slot, to create the fusion right?
Capacity has nothing to do with it.
The recent Seagate failures show that not everything is rosy.
Not sure about this new "fusion drive", I will get a new iMac during next years update (and at least get a 7200 rpm hard drive )
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Did Apple copy the Head and Shoulders Shampoo symbol found on each bottle for it's Fusion symbol?
Pics or it didn't happen?
http://www.headandshoulders.com/en-US/index.jspx?ipCheck=true
wow, wow, I meant to say 256GB SSD, so many comments about low storage.
Actually, I am very happy if APPLE offered the fusion drive (as a default even with 128GB SSD/256GB SSD Plus 1TB) for $1299, they did not right? they are after our money.
they increased $100 to make it thinner and pushed the cost to us make the reflection less.
here three year iMac user, I will NOT buy the new iMac any more; you cannot upgrade anything. I rather go with MBP plus monitor setup. then i can upgrade the HDD to SSD ... and RAM to 16GB
resale value of iMac are going down the hill every new upgrade.
That is Apple's new thing: steal IP from non-tech organizations (Swiss Federal Railways and a Shampoo maker)
Apple is using a "standard" disk plus Flash in the logic board. It is not a self contained system in the drive. So you can replace or upgrade the drive later.
(2) No you do NOT need fast access to you 150 GB of photos. You need fast access to only the subset of photos you want to work on anf to the set of thubnails and to the database index. 99% of the photos can stay on the slow drive. The trick is for OS X to "know" which 1% to keep on the fast Flash. There are ways for an OS to make a good guess about this. It's not a new idea, they taught multi-level storage in computer science classes in the 1980's but low cost flash is new so now we see it used.
When I first save a file, how does os know I will use it oftenly or not? even for me, it is a hard question at the beginning.
i meant 256GB SSD, obviously Apple could have offered the Fusion Drive as default
currently i am using 240GB Intel 330 SSD via firewire and using the internal 1TB storage as data disk
The probability of data loss is NOT the same as the probibilty of a device failure. The way you figure this out is to list all the common ways people loose data
1) Theft of other loss (fire flood or accident) of the equipment.
2) operator error. Accidental deletion or overwriting
3) software error, either by the application or the OS, either way the data are corrupted
The above are the big reasons why most data are lost. I think #2 is by far the most common, followed by #1
A backup system that is well thought out, that includes off site storage can be nearly 100% effective. Data loss should not be an issue.
I'm not thinking about data loss at all. Everyone should have a backup, preferably off-site. I am thinking purely about failure rates.
Exactly. Anyone who thinks Apple "invented" this is drinking too much of the KoolAid.
Question
Is this Fusion Drive a single piece of hardware like Hybrid Drives or just a SATA HDD and separate set of Solid State Memory segregated somewhere on the motherboard.
If it's a single piece of hardware, where can I get one.
Update:
Nevermind, got my answer 3-4 post before mine. DAYUM!!! Would have been nice to just do a simple Drive swap to extend my aging MacBook Pro service life.
Is this Fusion Drive a single piece of hardware like Hybrid Drives or just a SATA HDD and separate set of Solid State Memory segregated somewhere on the motherboard.
If it's a single piece of hardware, where can I get one.
Update:
Nevermind, got my answer 3-4 post before mine. DAYUM!!! Would have been nice to just do a simple Drive swap to extend my aging MacBook Pro service life.
I have such a setup. There's no way a consumer would want to deal with that. First, I had to take the DVD drive out and put an SSD in, and make that bootable. Then I had to manually find the large pieces of data, move them to the HDD, and create symbolic links to it. This broke the system a few times early on. I had to research how to move the iTunes library to a different drive. I had to configure my Downloads folder to be on the HDD. This is not easy for an average person who's not a software professional.
I still prefer my setup, because I can put a large Windows VM (my daytime job) on the 256GB SSD.128GB is not enough for me. I'd prefer an option of 256 or 500GB SSD + 3 TB HDD. Make it 7200rpm, forget about 5400 already.