The actual problem with the logo is that it seems a ripoff of Seagate graphics.
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Apple's New 'Fusion Drive' Not a Typical Hybrid Drive
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The actual problem with the logo is that it seems a ripoff of Seagate graphics.
Does anyone know the speed of the HD part of the fusion drive? Apple doesn't list it which makes me suspect it's 5400. Maybe that speed isn't that important but there will be times data is accessed there and I'd rather have it be 7200.
Hopefully that's the case, and assuming that's true hopefully it will be able to be set up on other macs. I wouldn't be surprised if it could work but Apple tried to block it out.
Also, if one were to do this in a mac pro, would it be possible to have multiple internal drives and specify which one is "fused" with an SSD? With the work I do I'd actually benefit more from leaving the system stuff on a regular drive and having a secondary HD along with SSD become a fusion partition.
Seriously Apple, roll out this functionality for all macs ASAP.
Hopefully that's the case, and assuming that's true hopefully it will be able to be set up on other macs. I wouldn't be surprised if it could work but Apple tried to block it out.
Also, if one were to do this in a mac pro, would it be possible to have multiple internal drives and specify which one is "fused" with an SSD? With the work I do I'd actually benefit more from leaving the system stuff on a regular drive and having a secondary HD along with SSD become a fusion partition.
Seriously Apple, roll out this functionality for all macs ASAP.
I think it would make sense for a 2 (or more) drive enclosure though, put an SSD and a large HD in there and create a Fusion volume. Conceptually it would not necessarily be any different from an external raid AFAIK.
Another question - when they say that system files are automatically put on SSD, does that mean just /System, or /Library as well? Personally I'd rather see it just have data that is actually loaded instead of all the system files (especially if they count Library as system files).
Totally depends on the work you do. For some users that would make the most sense, but I have a huge amount of data stored and it only gets loaded in bits and pieces. This is perfect for me, I've been asking for it on mac since intel announced their version months ago.
How could anyone, much less an average user, access ALL of a 250G photo library "fully all the time"? That would be a huge number of photos. Normal use case would be some photos would be accessed much more often than others, for which this setup is optimal. In theory there could be people with a ton of data and all of it is used equally as often but the number of situations like that would be vanishingly small.
And for most people who have a ton of data stored but don't access all of it all the time, that's a great solution as long as the algorithms for deciding where data is stored works well.
Totally depends on the work you do. For some users that would make the most sense, but I have a huge amount of data stored and it only gets loaded in bits and pieces. This is perfect for me, I've been asking for it on mac since intel announced their version months ago.
How could anyone, much less an average user, access ALL of a 250G photo library "fully all the time"? That would be a huge number of photos. Normal use case would be some photos would be accessed much more often than others, for which this setup is optimal. In theory there could be people with a ton of data and all of it is used equally as often but the number of situations like that would be vanishingly small.
And for most people who have a ton of data stored but don't access all of it all the time, that's a great solution as long as the algorithms for deciding where data is stored works well.
if successful ,hope it becomes a standard amongst all apple laptops
No. I want to use a self-contained hybrid drive, not something that is divided into two parts which would be a problem when you want to replace the hard disk.
And I want the hybridisation to run on the drive, so that as long as it has power, it can finish off whatever it is doing.
It would almost certainly always be an option. And even if they did ship it on every laptop, you could probably still go into disk utility and reformat the two drives independently.
Shouldn't be a problem for replacement anyway, you just replace one or the other and set it up again.
Shouldn't be a problem for replacement anyway, you just replace one or the other and set it up again.
With this you should be able to clone and swap as well. It's two drives but they appear as one to the user, so any method of replacing a disk should still work.
And again, if they did make it standard when you get the machine if you wanted you could immediately reformat as two separate drives.
It is not as obvious as that given the little information available. The only assumption that can be made is that it will not work.
No, the conclusion from what little is known is that it will not work unless there are special provisions.
one failure mode is "read-only"
It's more common for a solid state HDD to fail without warning than it is for a spinning HDD to fail without warning - especially if you have S.M.A.R.T. running.
In many cases, however, an SSD doesn't completely fail - it just becomes read-only. (This is because the failure is in the complicated LBA remapping logic and/or memory.) If your OS can mount the drive read-only, it can be possible to recover the data.
It's more common for a solid state HDD to fail without warning than it is for a spinning HDD to fail without warning - especially if you have S.M.A.R.T. running.
In many cases, however, an SSD doesn't completely fail - it just becomes read-only. (This is because the failure is in the complicated LBA remapping logic and/or memory.) If your OS can mount the drive read-only, it can be possible to recover the data.
But it still seems to use a type of RAID 0 striping configuration.
Something I don't think Apple is using. Then you have to worry about data loss if one of the drive fails.
The Intel SRT stuff is caching the data whereas the Fusion Drive seems to be tiering the data. In one system you're duplicating data and the other you're intelligently moving data from one storage subsystem to another.
It's good that Apple's doing this now because it is feasible that this type of tiering system is built right into the next filesystem whenever that comes to replace HFS+
ZFS has something similar in ZIL http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26212
It's good that Apple's doing this now because it is feasible that this type of tiering system is built right into the next filesystem whenever that comes to replace HFS+
ZFS has something similar in ZIL http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26212
My biggest curiosity with this is that if it is simply a software feature built into the build of Mountain Lion shipping with those Macs, and thusly a software feature built into future versions of Mountain Lion (like 10.8.3 through 10.8.last), will this eventually be a feature that users of, say, a high-end 2011 Mac mini configured with the 256GB SSD and the 750GB hard drive or a 2011 21.5" iMac with the 256GB SSD and a hard drive, or a 2010/2011 27" iMac with the 256GB SSD and hard drive, or...dare I say it, a Mac Pro with one of those SSDs and a hard drive, will be able to later take advantage of? Given that it is software and not a RAID or chipset feature, shouldn't this be something that desktop Mac users with these things be able to take full advantage of? Because that'd be incredibly irritating if it wasn't.
Other filesystems have also had tiered storage for ages as well.... Apple's bringing an old concept to Apple OSX, and is trying to present it as a breakthrough.
How will this affect bootcamp?
I'm looking forward to hearing the answer to this.
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Using the SSD as a cache (as in the hybrid drives or SRT) would make more sense. The solid state HDD is only a few percent of the size of the spinning HDD - does it really matter if you have 1.0 TB of disk space or 1.1 TB? (or 3.0 vs 3.1)
How will this affect bootcamp?
Apple already addressed this in a FAQ. The SSD can have only 1 (one) partition. The HDD can have at most 2 (two) partitions. You can still use Bootcamp but no SSD for the other OS.
I have previously felt flash is a bad idea for many of the reasons you state.
But I've been proven wrong. The iPhone's been out five years... all flash. iPad's been out for a while now too-- all flash. No epidemic of problems. SSDs in the Airs and now the Retina MacBook Pros: all flash, no problems. And those use the SSD for virtual memory! Their SSDs are constantly being written-to. With no huge avalanche of problems.
Which surprises me, as I've had thumb drives fail on me and, as I said, have never quite trusted Flash for that reason except for read-often/write-rarely applications like iPods. But somehow Apple's implementation seems very reliable. (And I'm not hearing of wholesale issues with other SSD implementations such as in Ultrabooks, though the record is considerably sparser for those at this date.)
So it seems Apple's way of doing things may be working. Given the reliability of their SSDs even in the face of virtual memory, I'd be inclined to trust them for the Fusion drive. But I'd still back up often!
Let's put it this way: I view even a coddled rotating-media drive as dangerously near a catastrophic end-of-life incident at about two to two-and-a-half years. I tend to summarily replace my drives at about that age out of an abundance of caution, especially in laptops. Based on Apple's history with the Airs and now the rMBPs, I'd probably keep doing so, but because of the rotating-media part of the drives, not because of their flash partition.
I don't think they focused on Fusion Drive enough to call it "presenting a breakthrough" but when you think about it few "mainstream" platforms have moved to tier storage. Sure Intel has it in their Z68 motherboards but so few of these are sold it almost doesn't matter.
The Z68 has cache, not tier. The 2011 iMacs are Z68-based. It was one of the most popular chipsets until the arrival of Z77 in April, which also has Intel's cache technology.