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Fusion Drive - Standalone purchase?
- Thread starter Risco
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0 chance. There is no physical product called a Fusion drive, fusion drive is the name for a hardware/software system of utilizing both a standard hard drive and a blade SSD installed into the system to marry both of their benefits to a single drive that the OS sees.
The closest you can get is a seagate momentus xt which is a hybrid hard drive with a flash cache, those top out at 750GB capacity and only have 8gb of flash cache vs the fusion drive system with 1tb/3tb and 128gb flash . It will not work in the same manner through mountain lion like the "fusion drive" system, but the momentus xt derives its benefits from a similar process.
The closest you can get is a seagate momentus xt which is a hybrid hard drive with a flash cache, those top out at 750GB capacity and only have 8gb of flash cache vs the fusion drive system with 1tb/3tb and 128gb flash . It will not work in the same manner through mountain lion like the "fusion drive" system, but the momentus xt derives its benefits from a similar process.
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omgitscro
macrumors 6502a
I believe the "Fusion Drive" is really just Apple installing both a regular HD and one of their tiny SSDs into the iMac and using some new capabilities in Mountain Lion to "fuse" them at the software levelor that's what Ars said if I remember correctly. So there isn't any one physical drive that you could install in any computer.
It's a curious thing. I mean, I wonder if this is user configurable. Buy a 12GB SSD and a rotary and set parameters in Lion.
Why do I have the feeling this is not going to an option? 😀
Why do I have the feeling this is not going to an option? 😀
I would suspect it is locked to only systems that have both blade SSD and the ability for a second standard internal drive, which would limit it to the new imac and mac mini.
nuckinfutz
macrumors 603
How do you explain the Fusion Drive option in the 21.5 iMac that only has one drive? Apple should be able to deliver Fusion Drive options for the cMBP but they may not do so for a while.
it only has room for 1 standard hard drive yes, but it also has a slot for a blade SSD, which is where the fusion ability comes from. I'm guessing orders without SSD or fusion drive will be machines that either have an empty blade SSD slot or they have a different logic board all together that has no SSD blade slot.
There are such things as Hybrid Drives that usually have a Notebook HDD and a small size SSD (Probably 4GB-6GB) and the SSD is used as a cache for the HDD.
omgitscro
macrumors 6502a
This is probably why OP was confused. Ars believes that this will not be the case with the Fusion drive.
Piplodocus
macrumors 6502a
What's the thinking on this being very hardware specific? I'm guessing I'm not too likely to get lucky, and a hack's coming so my Mid-2010 MBP which currently has a 256GB SSD and a 1TB 5400rpm platter (optibay) in it could get this happening?
Yup, I had not looked at the specifics and thought it was a hybrid but improved. I would not call it revolutionary as it is the same as Intels Smart Response. I had the chance to test it on a Dell XPS L521X, it gave a nice boost.
MaxPower72
macrumors 6502
If it's from Apple is a revolutionary new vision for the future.
Why can't they just finally slap SSDs on any Mac once and for all instead of coming up with this bs and still installing 5400 rpm HDs on $2000+ machines?
hallux
macrumors 68040
Not hating on Apple at all, but this is also not a brand new concept, though Apple has tweaked it some. Asus has utilized a feature in the X79 chipset and called it "SSD Caching". This uses an installed SSD as a cached for frequently used data. Apple modified the concept some and is storing the entire OS on the SSD with some room to spare for other data.
One would HOPE there would be a way to "unlock" that feature set in OS X so those of us with a cMBP could make use of it.
One would HOPE there would be a way to "unlock" that feature set in OS X so those of us with a cMBP could make use of it.
So, will the next revision of the MBP line use fusion drives or regular SSDs? What do you guys think?
I think that the next revision of the MBP line will drop the non-retina models, leaving just the retina models with blade SSDs.
I don't see them doing extra work to keep spinning hard drives in their notebooks.
Right, they did a lot of work to make the the MBP thinner. They aren't going to make it thicker just to add a HDD. Never mind then.