Yep, make use of the caching in Mavericks and use sleep and the boot and launch times are irrelevant.
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Buying a HDD 27" iMac
- Thread starter TripleMoxy
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Yep, make use of the caching in Mavericks and use sleep and the boot and launch times are irrelevant.
My opinion is that it's not worth it. The performance bang for the buck is off the charts with the Fusion, in fact it's the best bang for buck compared to upgrading the CPU or GPU. You stand to quadruple your performance for similar money.
Fair enough. All that really matters is that it is fast enough for you and I'm glad to hear this is the case.
Just curious, but have you ever experienced SSD performance? I don't think it's a gaming thing. That's more the CPU and GPU, although SSD doesn't hurt.
Incidentally, I was never trying to claim that Macs with HDD-only are unusably slow. It's just that they start to seem that way once you've used one with a Fusion drive or SSD.
I have but I guess not long enough to notice the performance difference.
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A lot of emphasis goes to boot time here.
That is something I could care less about. I think I bought my Mac, turned it on and that's it. I think it booted for an update once....I wasn't in that big of a rush...
I agree that you do see a lot of comments pointing it out but for me personally a faster boot time is not anywhere near the top of my list of performance advantages for flash drives. Blazing fast file transfers (and no fragmentation), durability thanks to no moving parts, lower power consumption and silent operation all rank higher than the ability to boot in 12 seconds. Then again, I'm not complaining about the boot speeds either.
I agree that you do see a lot of comments pointing it out but for me personally a faster boot time is not anywhere near the top of my list of performance advantages for flash drives. Blazing fast file transfers (and no fragmentation), durability thanks to no moving parts, lower power consumption and silent operation all rank higher than the ability to boot in 12 seconds. Then again, I'm not complaining about the boot speeds either.
I just ran the launch all apps test. All apps (around 80 were launched) taken around 30 seconds to launch from the HDD. I then closed them all. Now that they are all cached in the RAM, I opened them all up again and they taken around 6-7 seconds to launch. It was like watching them all open on an SSD! This is the benefits of App Cache that you would not have experienced back in 2009. I'm not saying that people should go all HDD no matter what, I just saying the HDD's are still great.
...until it tears itself apart and breaks down
If it is not a bad HDD, it should last as long as an SSD (due to them having a set amount of read/writes). And if it is a bad HDD, Apple will replace it (as it would most likely go bad in the first year), and Apple offer you an SSD as a replacement (you of course have to pay the extra money though).
Just tried a new iMac in a Apple store with the HDD inside.
Was really surprised how fast it was, i was looking in the system specs twice cause i thought it was an SSD. My 2012 macbook pro with HDD is much slower.
Yip. App Caching is outright amazing. Theoretically allowing for data access speeds of around 100X faster than a SSD for previously launched applications. It really is down the the processor. Once I launched all of my apps a second time on my HDD, they all opened up within 6-7 seconds. That is around the same speed in which an SSD would have taken to have opened them all up first time.
Like I said, I'm glad to hear you're pleased with the performance and anyway, get em while you can. The low end choice for storage in the next major iMac revision may very well be a Fusion Drive.
Many were surprised to see an HDD-only option in the Late 2013s.Like I said, I'm glad to hear you're pleased with the performance and anyway, get em while you can. The low end choice for storage in the next major iMac revision may very well be a Fusion Drive.
I hope that happens. It will make the iMac a more affordable overall purchase for those who want a better performing option.
My 2012 macbook pro with HDD is much slower.
That is the problem with 2.5' drives...
My iMac has the 2.5" drive. And it certainly is not slow. Look at my other comments.
Each to their own I guess. I don't have a 'problem' - i.e. I could use a 2.5' 5400 rpm drive but I tend to prefer an SSD or a fast HDD (that being 3.5 or 7200rpm).
BTW, what read/write speeds do you get?