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Do you know HOW easy it would have been to Google that? VERY :)

I upgraded my friend's 2012 Mac Mini from an HDD to a "Fusion" drive - it's a matter of simply attaching another drive to the Mac, mounting it in an adaptor and then running a few bash commands to tell OS X that it's a "fused" volume. There's no "trickery" about this, electronics isn't smoke and fairy dust, it's just a very clever software system inside Mac OS X.

Here, have a read:

https://www.ifixit.com/Story/12535/Adding_SSD_and_new_big_HD_as_Fusion_Drive_to_iMac

If you prefer visual learning, like I do:


Do you know HOW much of a dick you didn't have to be? ;)

Great... you can make your own Fusion drive. I learned something new. Thank you.

But here's my point: If you're already gonna have two drives (an SSD and a traditional hard drive)... why bother making a Fusion drive at all?

It's not unusual to have an OS drive and a data drive (or multiple data drives)

I don't see what you gain by combining them into a single "fused" volume... but with some files kept on the SSD and some on the hard drive.

I guess I don't like the computer making those kinds of decisions for me... even if it is supposed to be seamless and invisible.

Obviously my vote is for an SSD for the OS and a separate hard drive for data. If I'm already opening an iMac and replacing the old SATA hard drive with an SSD... I'd make that my OS drive. And then use external hard drives for storage.

But it's good to have options.
 
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I barely fill up 8GB of RAM let alone 64GB. What is the rest of the memory used for? Having 500 tabs of YouTube or something? Having 50 games open? Or rendering 100 videos of 4K at the same time?
This is what I'm wondering. Isn't the graphics card going to be the roadblock before you go past 32GB?
 
hm...and what would it be? (Sincerely asking for answer)
The graphics card is stock, but I did upgrade the CPU from i5 to i7...
I'm pretty sure it's an outdated GPU or (more probably) the lack of SSD.
 
hm...and what would it be? (Sincerely asking for answer)
The graphics card is stock, but I did upgrade the CPU from i5 to i7...
Depends on what you're doing. I bought a 27" $3000+ iMac in late 2012. Have 32GB RAM. My biggest issue no question is GPU (video editing machine, mostly).
 
Do you know HOW much of a dick you didn't have to be? ;)

Great... you can make your own Fusion drive. I learned something new. Thank you.

But here's my point: If you're already gonna have two drives (an SSD and a traditional hard drive)... why bother making a Fusion drive at all?

It's not unusual to have an OS drive and a data drive (or multiple data drives)

I don't see what you gain by combining them into a single "fused" volume... but with some files kept on the SSD and some on the hard drive.

I guess I don't like the computer making those kinds of decisions for me... even if it is supposed to be seamless and invisible.

Obviously my vote is for an SSD for the OS and a separate hard drive for data. If I'm already opening an iMac and replacing the old SATA hard drive with an SSD... I'd make that my OS drive. And then use external hard drives for storage.

But it's good to have options.
The advantage of having them together as one drive is the OS will keep files you use a lot on the SSD to keep things fast and this takes zero work from you instead of having to remember on which drive to put things. Fusion drives really aren't that hard to set up, a few lines of code in terminal basically. I added a 256GB 840 Pro to my 2011 27" and made a Fusion with the stock 1TB and it runs really great. The real question would be is in a Retina iMac that only comes with an SSD do they still have the SATA port and space for the hard drive. Maybe a teardown will tell the story.
 
128GB on my iPhone 6 is even twice as nice as 64GB;)
i had 128gb on my iphone 6plus, and tbh i only ever used 30-40 gbs, even with lots of crap i really did not use. for my needs 30gbs is plenty- thus 64 gb is the logical choice, which is what i went with for the 6s+. 16gb as the entry model is idiotic, espeically since so many aps these days are taking more and more precious space, even with cloud storage. i hve drop box, ix loud and i tb one drive. Although i have 4g lte and fibre broadband, these are not avaialble everywhere i go, and i travel a fair bit. Thus my core apps, data, and media must remain on my phone, which have remained at 30-40gbs for some time.

My sister for eg, watches loads of movie on her iphone, and thus can easily fill a 128gb iphone.

I feel that appse should do 32, 64 128gbs, for the cost one is paying for the base model, 32gb should be standard
 
I barely fill up 8GB of RAM let alone 64GB. What is the rest of the memory used for? Having 500 tabs of YouTube or something? Having 50 games open? Or rendering 100 videos of 4K at the same time?
Try to run couple of virtual machines, to compile big c++ project, to process TBs of data - 64GB is not much, trouble starts when you need more than 256GB in single box. But if you mainly using a browser, then 8GB should be enough for you.
 
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The advantage of having them together as one drive is the OS will keep files you use a lot on the SSD to keep things fast and this takes zero work from you instead of having to remember on which drive to put things. Fusion drives really aren't that hard to set up, a few lines of code in terminal basically. I added a 256GB 840 Pro to my 2011 27" and made a Fusion with the stock 1TB and it runs really great. The real question would be is in a Retina iMac that only comes with an SSD do they still have the SATA port and space for the hard drive. Maybe a teardown will tell the story.
Thanks for the reply.

On your 27" did you keep the 1TB inside and put the new SSD as an external?

That seems easier than opening an iMac to replace a drive.
 
That's exactly what I worry about... Jony thinking it's still too thick... :)

New Apple Slogan: The Apple iMac so impossibly thin at the edges, if it falls on your child it will simply cut them in half. Simply Brilliant.

Yeah, I want meat clever edges to my computer. WTF?!
 
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The advantage of having them together as one drive is the OS will keep files you use a lot on the SSD to keep things fast and this takes zero work from you instead of having to remember on which drive to put things. Fusion drives really aren't that hard to set up, a few lines of code in terminal basically. I added a 256GB 840 Pro to my 2011 27" and made a Fusion with the stock 1TB and it runs really great. The real question would be is in a Retina iMac that only comes with an SSD do they still have the SATA port and space for the hard drive. Maybe a teardown will tell the story.
You could use external disk for fusion drive too. Either adding external ssd or (faster option) using fast apple ssd and external tb hdd. But external drive should always be connected in that case.
 
Uhhh, won't that get erased if you don't write it all to disk before shutdown? :D Edit: Oh, I see someone already mentioned that. Problem is there's nothing in the OS to automatically load and save the RAM disk to/from storage media. Maybe we'll have that feature coming up.

It kind of works that way already. With 64GB of RAM the OS will use most of it to cache the disk. Very soon you will have most of the files you use in the cache and you will have the effect of a RAM drive. And the OS will of course save the changes to disk.

a RAM drive is a bit obsolete except if you are running on a very small computer that boot off a USB stick.
 
Thanks for the reply.

On your 27" did you keep the 1TB inside and put the new SSD as an external?

That seems easier than opening an iMac to replace a drive.
On my model there was an extra SATA port and enough space inside to put an SSD so I did it that way, but I know people have used an external and I think it works ok as long as it doesn't get disconnected for some reason. I wanted it to be inside for tidiness and potential reliability reasons. I did have to be pretty careful getting the LCD out so watch out for that if you ever do that. 2012's and newer are more of a pain to open with the adhesive tape instead of magnets FYI.
 
You could use external disk for fusion drive too. Either adding external ssd or (faster option) using fast apple ssd and external tb hdd. But external drive should always be connected in that case.
I've heard of people using those. I would be curious to see if there are any reliability concerns of using that over USB3 or if it would be better to use a Thunderbolt enclosure. Also it would be interesting to see speed differences between internal SSD/external HDD combo and internal HDD/external SSD combo.
 
At work we got new 27-inch iMacs about four years ago. Great upgrade from the Power Mac G5 towers we had -- I'm not kidding -- but now that 4GB of RAM is ridiculous. I don't know how much 64 would help, but 12 sure is splendid on my personal iMac.
 
- Single 16GB module - $329.99

- 32GB Kit using 16GB x 2 Modules - $599.00

- 48GB Kit with 16GB x 2 + 8GB x 2 - $729.00

- 64GB Kit with 16GB x 4 - $1195.00

U+wot+m8+u+wanna+go+i+ll+bash+ur+head+_12680e1b51c065e6a6def01ece7b420a.jpg
 
Hey, everybody pull up a chair and let's listen to people's exciting stories about how their Mac had a 20MB hard drive and 2MB of RAM back in the 1980s. It sure must have been a magical time!
 
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Uhhh, won't that get erased if you don't write it all to disk before shutdown? :D Edit: Oh, I see someone already mentioned that. Problem is there's nothing in the OS to automatically load and save the RAM disk to/from storage media. Maybe we'll have that feature coming up.
We already have that, it's how OS'es normally work.
 
I know the 27" has an AMD(YUCK) graphics card, but does it have integrated graphic and the AMD or just the AMD. I like to play games(call of duty, splinter cell, etc) and my 2009 NVidia never had a problem keeping up/staying cool. I don't know anything about the AMD graphics cards that are offered. Anybody know enough to give a rundown on the graphics
 
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