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Apple's New 'Fusion Drive' Not a Typical Hybrid Drive

Nice add on

Excellent feature; Microsoft introduced similar tech in Win 7 called "ReadyBoost", but I don't think many adopted it since the OEM had to build in the extra flash (although you could do it easily enough with a desktop).

Nice add on for what shouldn't cost a lot given that not a lot of flash is needed. Generally speaking the working set of a given system (the most used data) should fit within less than 10GB of flash (and in reality, much less than that).

It will be interesting to see how it promotes/demotes data to cache and what control you have, if such options exist. I work for a storage company (EMC) so tech like this is particularly interesting to me.
 
anybody know the speed for the HDD part in the 'Fusion Drive' - is it 5400rpm or 7200rpm ???
the concept is nice, but slow HDD will be a deal breaker for many users, same with the small SSD (would be nice to have bigger SSD part in the future)...
 
justinfreid said:
In my 13" MacBook Pro I currently have a fast SSD in my optical bay and an upgraded 1TB hard drive in the hard drive bay. I've sort of tried to roll my own Fusion Drive by moving things around as necessary.

Any leads on whether the Fusion Drive technology can be applied to configurations without Apple's blessing? Phil Schiller mentioned that the logic was already built into OS X.
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this is the same thing i've been wondering...
I have a 128GB SSD + a 1TB drive in my 2011 iMac (the fat one :( lol)
--the SSD is where everything lives.. but for my user folder - i created a sym~link -- and it actually is just an alias and really lives on the 1TB drive....
 
praetorian909 said:
Very interesting, though I'm wondering what if one of those drives fail. Is your data retrievable from the other one?
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According to the article, https://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/23/apples-new-fusion-drive-not-a-typical-hybrid-drive/, the Data is neither Cached nor duplicated, so unless you had back-ups in place, your data would be lost. Also see Sneakz's post below.

Sneakz said:
Don't mistake it though. You'll still lose all your data.
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JesterJJZ said:
Personally, an SSD boot drive and separate large HD seems more practical. No need to "fuse" them into one volume. Just seems like asking for trouble.
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If properly implemented, this could be like having an HDD and SSD on steroids, after all, your most often accessed items is a 'fluid' thing, subject to change. For software to recognize this, and transfer files/data accordingly, would give a user the maximum speed advantage that SSD's offer.
 
Avatarshark said:
I wonder when will they release a separate Fusion drives for people who want to upgrade their MacBook Pro, well for those people who's hard drive isn't fused (get it) to the motherboard.
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Whose hard drive is fused to the motherboard? :confused:

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JesterJJZ said:
What is the procedure when one of the two drives fail? Seems like a Raid0 scenario.
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The procedure is:
  1. Replace the drive
  2. Restore from backup.
 
geta said:
anybody know the speed for the HDD part in the 'Fusion Drive' - is it 5400rpm or 7200rpm ???
the concept is nice, but slow HDD will be a deal breaker for many users, same with the small SSD (would be nice to have bigger SSD part in the future)...
Click to expand...

They'll probably up it to 256GB in future iMacs, when there's more flash memory to go around, and prices have come down a bit more. I venture to say, that at this time, for the average non-professional user, 128GB is plenty.
 
HiRez said:
The way I see it, this is a variation of what OS X has been using for a long time: moving frequently used files to the faster "hot zone" on the outside of the drive (faster rotational speed). But here, the "hot zone" is a separate flash storage drive instead of being on the same hard disk. But sounds like cool technology. Is it all contained in a single unit? Can it be replaced easily, or as a single unit?

Unfortunately, where I need speed is for my ~150 GB of RAW photos, and it looks like the flash storage component is too small to fully benefit me there. The hard drive on my 2011 iMac is deathly slow, my MacBook Air is WAY faster, despite technically being much lower-specced. That SSD makes all the difference in the world.
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.
 
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This Will Be An Easy Prediction

The next great thing from Apple to suffer from problems and hardware failure. Won't be long before the forums will be full of posts from users complaining about all the problems they're having and reports of how Apple is turning a deaf ear to them - "problems, what problems?"
 
sinfonye said:
That would be true if both drives have the same failure rate. However, SSDs have a much lower mean-time-between-failures than HDDs. The HDD may even have a lower failure rate than usual (e.g. if it is usually powered down because most access is to the SSD).

So the Fusion drive failure rate is likely to be close to the HDD failure rate, or possibly much better. Doesn't sound like something to worry about!
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If SSDs have a "much lower MTBF" than the overall volume failure rate will be lower than this. This is one of the issues with raid setups (I know, this is not raid but the principle applies here). When you add two pieces of hardware together, the resulting overall MTBF is lower than the lowest one. BTW, low MTBF is a bad thing.

MTBF calculator http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/reliability_calculator/
 
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stockscalper said:
The next great thing from Apple to suffer from problems and hardware failure. Won't be long before the forums will be full of posts from users complaining about all the problems they're having and reports of how Apple is turning a deaf ear to them - "problems, what problems?"
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This is irrelevant in regards to Fusion. Not sure why you're ranting.
 
shanmugam said:
This is actually not needed if apple went with 256GB as standard :rolleyes:
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That's hardly enough.

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shanmugam said:
most of us do not need that bigger size as main drive, you always need to backup the data into some external drive.
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Having an external drive to put stuff on is not a 'backup,' if it only lives on there. Both the main drive and the external backup drive need to be large.
 
Caching seems like a better solution. Its the space in the SSD thats prime real estate, not the space in the HDD. SO it doen't matter if frequently used files/programs are only cached in the SSD and there's an extra copy of them on the HDD.
 
"fusiondrive" = bullshti!!!!

just give me a 100% SSD 500GB drive thats it... i dont want a half old half new drive..lol
 
I hope I can configure aftermarket...

I currently have a Mac Mini with a 120GB SSD & a 1TB 7200RPM HD. I wonder if we'll be able to configure this setup ourselves after the fact, to make OS X think I have a "Fusion Drive"... I can't imagine I'll get a ton better performance but letting the OS do tiered analysis should improve things.

To those that think this is useless, you must not have a lot of data. I actually need a good 750GB of data for everything I use, especially on a desktop. At that price point, SSD is cost prohibitive. If you only have 200 GB of data, then yes, I can understand you complaining that they should have just put in a 256 GB SSD and be done with it, but for a lot of people, that is hardly an option. And considering the price of a "Fusion Drive" will rival the cost of one 256 GB SSD, I think this is the best of both worlds for everyone.
 
Zfs ??

tod said:
Best new Mac feature Apple has come out with in a long time. Stuff like Power Nap isn't terribly significant, but Fusion is.

It's nice how writes happen to the SSD, then are moved to the HD later. Looks like a good implementation. Too bad we're most likely stuck with sucky HFS+ if we want to use Fusion. For me, data integrity trumps speed, so I'll stick with my dual partition HFS+ / ZFS solution for now.
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Didn't Apple hire one of the experts in ZFS awhile back? Maybe Fusion is the result of Apple's interest in that technology.
 
JesterJJZ said:
Personally, an SSD boot drive and separate large HD seems more practical. No need to "fuse" them into one volume. Just seems like asking for trouble.
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they arent physically fused, it's just the OS offering it as single volume to the app layer. it can be backed up just like a single volume; and if you lose a single volume youd be in the same sort of trouble.

so what sort of trouble does it pose that a failed single volume doesnt?

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Sneakz said:
Don't mistake it though. You'll still lose all your data.
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one of the articles states if one drive fails you dont lose all your data -- the other physical volume is still undamaged. it shows up in Disk Manager...so you could manually retrieve stuff from it.

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shanmugam said:
This is actually not needed if apple went with 256GB as standard :rolleyes:
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256gb aint a lot. put a few games on there and youll see why.

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btbeme said:
Way cool technology aside, is anyone else curious how VMWare feels about the name?
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no. are you curious about Ford? or Gillette? different products, different categories, different names.

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lilo777 said:
and most likely that's exactly what it is. It has been available on PCs for a while.
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hmm. well, going by the data youve provided to back up that assertion, id say its most likely made of cheese.
 
This is gonna be a superb upgrade from people with HDD.

All writes will be in SSD speed. And your most frequently reads will be SSD speed. 128GB is CRAZY. All your apps and documents certainlly, many people don even have such data in their systems.

For myself, coming from a Seagte Hybrid, I plan on going directly to a 960GB SSD
 
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