Good choice again. What posters above don't realize that you have significantly MUCH HIGHER RISK with a Fusion drive vs a SSD or even HDD alone. A Fusion drive setup has the same reliability of a RAID 0 setup. If either the SSD or HDD fails, you lose all your data. So in a sense you're doubling your risk of failure. My next iMac (if Apple ever builds one that will make me want to replace my 2012 27) will not have fusion like my current one. If you're a basic Facebook/Instagram user that seems to be everyone these days, the fusion drive should be adequate. If you're going to use your iMac for work, do what ravinder08 did: get the SSD and then add an external USB 3.0 HDD. You'll have the best of both worlds...
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Fusion Drive Happiness?
- Thread starter scottydawg
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True but why would you subject yourself to double the risk of failure when a higher performing & more reliable solution is available. (unfortunately it does require you to have an 'ugly box' attached to your thin iMac)There's plenty of backup options these days my good man.
How do you backup whats on your ugly box? Another ugly box? All gets a bit messy then.
It was either 1TB Fusion or 1TB SSD. Cost of the latter made it unrealistic. Reliability is not really a concern with Apple Care. Lasts me 3 years, I upgrade again.
Look at this from a different angle. If either drive goes at some point you can still reinstall the OS on the working drive(need to decouple them) and at least have a usable computer.
Just how do you reach the conclusion that a Fusion Drive has double the risk of failure?
It isn't double the risk because an SSD is less likely to fail than an HDD, but the risk is increased because you are introducing more variables. Either the SSD or the HDD failing will cost you all of your data.
I would do a 2 or 3 TB Time Capsule or just another external drive, and then I always always always recommend Backblaze or some other offsite Internet backup. My apartment was broken in to and they stole my laptop and my external hard drive backup. I lost no data because everything was backed up to Backblaze.
But if there's only 1 hard drive, you'll lose all of your data when it's failed, too.
+1
But I think since they reduce the SSD storage of 1 TB Fusion Drive, the choices might be 2TB (or above) Fusion or 1TB SSD.
Could you look at the System Report, and note the Rotational Rate of the Hard Drive?
(this is from the previous generation)
Aside from my own good experiences with the 3TB Fusion, I believe the benchmarks I've seen also show good performance.
Read speeds seem to be around 1,500, vs 1,700 for pure SSD.
Write speeds seem to be significantly less ~700 vs 1,400, which is the biggest difference
But both are screaming speeds! Remember that Apple has just seriously increased the I/O bus to the drives. 700 writes are still crazy fast, as in about the same speed as last year's fastest SSDs. And really, how many of us are gunna' be writing enough data to tell the difference?
My hunch says that most buyers will be able to tell the difference within the first few hours of getting their systems, but only in the first few hours of getting their systems. Shortening the time it takes to copy all of the data from your old system to your new one is probably about the most significant impact that this will have on most users/ lives, and even then it won't likely be very big.
Again, today's Fusion drive is crazy fast! Even my ~3yo Fusion drive is crazy fast.
Read speeds seem to be around 1,500, vs 1,700 for pure SSD.
Write speeds seem to be significantly less ~700 vs 1,400, which is the biggest difference
But both are screaming speeds! Remember that Apple has just seriously increased the I/O bus to the drives. 700 writes are still crazy fast, as in about the same speed as last year's fastest SSDs. And really, how many of us are gunna' be writing enough data to tell the difference?
My hunch says that most buyers will be able to tell the difference within the first few hours of getting their systems, but only in the first few hours of getting their systems. Shortening the time it takes to copy all of the data from your old system to your new one is probably about the most significant impact that this will have on most users/ lives, and even then it won't likely be very big.
Again, today's Fusion drive is crazy fast! Even my ~3yo Fusion drive is crazy fast.
Right, but when calculating failure rates of systems you multiply the failure rate of each component. The failure rate of the system is higher than the failure rate of any of its constituent parts. http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/apr/section1/apr182.htm
Murphy lives. I've had spinners die on me, and flash just go haywire. In the old days, I even had power supplies kill more than that. Nowadays, I back up locally & remote. I back everything up, period.