Best Drive Configuration?

[joelpagan]

Hello! I have an iMac with a 1TB fusion drive, which I purchased before realizing that the 1TB drives only have a 28GB SSD with them now. I am not interested in exchanging / returning / the iMac, and I'm not ready to crack it open at this stage, so I'm looking for the next best thing. Here are the two options I'm considering:

1. Use external SSD as boot drive. Use internal drive for media. Separate SSD regular drive, and use 28GB drive for.. ? Could leave them together too, I guess.
2. Use external SSD and build a Fusion drive with it and the internal SSD. Benefits of blade SSD for most used functions and pretty quick fallback when it's too big? Use regular drive for media.

I have a Samsung T3 on USB3. It gets great speeds, but the internal 28GB SSD obviously gets higher speeds still. Fusion drive setup is interesting. Thanks!

 

[casperes1996]

Hello! I have an iMac with a 1TB fusion drive, which I purchased before realizing that the 1TB drives only have a 28GB SSD with them now. I am not interested in exchanging / returning / the iMac, and I'm not ready to crack it open at this stage, so I'm looking for the next best thing. Here are the two options I'm considering:

1. Use external SSD as boot drive. Use internal drive for media. Separate SSD regular drive, and use 28GB drive for.. ? Could leave them together too, I guess.
2. Use external SSD and build a Fusion drive with it and the internal SSD. Benefits of blade SSD for most used functions and pretty quick fallback when it's too big? Use regular drive for media.

I have a Samsung T3 on USB3. It gets great speeds, but the internal 28GB SSD obviously gets higher speeds still. Fusion drive setup is interesting. Thanks!

I'm not quite sure if it's possible to fuse more than 2 drives, but if it is, why not fuse it all?

 

[Fishrrman]

What kind of read/write speeds are you getting -right now-?

 

[joelpagan]

What kind of read/write speeds are you getting -right now-?

Attached are tests at 16GB and 1GB. With the traditional media the Fusion drops down pretty low as size increases, so thinking that backing up the higher burst capability with the T3 may be my best bet here. Thoughts or disadvantages?

 

[fotofan]

Apple should be more transparent about the differences in the SSD portion of these drives. Or better yet, simply increase the paltry size of the SSD on the 1 TB Fusion drives. The step up on the 2 and 3 TB fusion drives is considerable. Has anyone like Barefeats done real world tests on the speed differences with various tasks between these drives?

 

[joelpagan]

Apple should be more transparent about the differences in the SSD portion of these drives. Or better yet, simply increase the paltry size of the SSD on the 1 TB Fusion drives. The step up on the 2 and 3 TB fusion drives is considerable. Has anyone like Barefeats done real world tests on the speed differences with various tasks between these drives?

I agree. I have a late 2014 iMac with 1GB Fusion (128GB ssd) as well that my wife uses for photo and video editing, which I was using until purchasing the new iMac. I didn't realize the difference until while using the new iMac it continually felt slower and like it got bogged down much more easily, thus launching my research and discovery. Anecdotally it is significantly slower. Personally I think it's intentional. Faster than a standard drive but noticeably slower than an SSD, in regular usage, thus driving upgrades. 128 is large enough that you really don't notice it.
[doublepost=1497891387][/doublepost]I went ahead and tried the Internal 28GB + 500GB T3 in Fusion. We'll see how it does. Tests are as expected, Blade performance for data on there and larger files show about what the T3 was getting by itself. Seems reasonably quick so far.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"Attached are tests at 16GB and 1GB. With the traditional media the Fusion drops down pretty low as size increases"

Really ... how often are you going to be writing files that are 16gb in size?
It's one of those "test results" that look good on paper (or on the screen), but have little practical value in real life.

On the other hand, the reads/writes using 1gb seem highly favorable to the fusion drive (even accounting for the small 24gb SSD).

If it was me, I'd just keep using the fusion drive as the boot drive.
I'd run the 1gb speed test periodically (say, once a month).
If read speeds ever got below 430, then I'd think about "an external booter".

But that fusion drive seems to be doing just fine right now.
If it ain't broke...

 

[casperes1996]

OP wrote:
"Attached are tests at 16GB and 1GB. With the traditional media the Fusion drops down pretty low as size increases"

Really ... how often are you going to be writing files that are 16gb in size?
It's one of those "test results" that look good on paper (or on the screen), but have little practical value in real life.

On the other hand, the reads/writes using 1gb seem highly favorable to the fusion drive (even accounting for the small 24gb SSD).

If it was me, I'd just keep using the fusion drive as the boot drive.
I'd run the 1gb speed test periodically (say, once a month).
If read speeds ever got below 430, then I'd think about "an external booter".

But that fusion drive seems to be doing just fine right now.
If it ain't broke...

One thing is writing files that large - which could easily happen if you work with. multimedia - but another is reading files, which you do all the time. Their size doesn't matter, cause with a 24GB SSD, the files are most likely to be exclusively on the HDD. Now sure, you can have the core OS on the SSD, and perhaps 18GB of extra stuff... But that's really limiting. Fusion Drives are really smart for the way they put the most used blocks on the SSD, but with that little space to work with, most things on the Fusion Drive, aside from boot up, would be hard drive speed when reading.