New iMac 27 inch, i7 Fusion or SSD

[Drachir2000]

About to pull the trigger on a new iMac, should I do fusion or SSD? I am a little concerned that 1TB SSD may not be enough, but the same time 3tb fusion seems like I will have tons of wasted space on it. Opinions....? Anyone do the full SSD iMac?

 

[AZhappyjack]

About to pull the trigger on a new iMac, should I do fusion or SSD? I am a little concerned that 1TB may not be enough, but the same time 3tb fusion seems like I will have tons of wasted space on it. Opinions....? Anyone do the full SSD iMac?

I did the 2TB fusion drive. The performance is good - no issues to date (only had it about 3 weeks).

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Dont get the 1TB Fusion drive, it lacks a proper size SSD.

 

[MadDane]

Based on your signature you both have an iMac with a 3TB Fusion Drive as well as a rMBP with a 1TB SSD. In other words, you know the performance of both (although your rMBP has a slower SSD than the current ones). What are your experiences with those? How do they perform? What do you prefer?

Personally in this day and age I would not buy a computer with a spinning drive. That would leave the SSD for me, personally. If I needed more space than the SSD allowed, I would simply buy an external USB drive (either HDD or SSD) and store stuff on that thing.

 

[kschendel]

Depends on what you're doing with it. The 1 Tb Fusion is OK if you aren't doing many large writes (or a very large number of small ones). For production work with large project or video files, the SSD in the 1 Tb might not be large enough to help.

 

[yugioh5d]

Make decision yet? I picked 3TB Fusion because of storage space. SSD would be better because of its silent operation (no moving mechanical part like HDD) and faster. Need additional space? External Thunderbolt drive or USB3 ones. Saving money? 3TB would be an option. Decision also varies base on what you are doing with your Mac.

 

[Sirmausalot]

About to pull the trigger on a new iMac, should I do fusion or SSD? I am a little concerned that 1TB SSD may not be enough, but the same time 3tb fusion seems like I will have tons of wasted space on it. Opinions....? Anyone do the full SSD iMac?

If you can afford the 1TB NVRAM drive, get it. Having external storage sooner or later is fine -- for back up, extra large media files, whatever. But you will easily get the best performance and life out of your machine with that configuration over the 3TB Fusion.

 

[TheBigApple2006]

I actually went for 512GB SSD. Don't work with video, have photos on NAS (JPG, so no massive transfers), plus SD cards are getting cheaper and faster - we will soon be able to stick a 512 GB card in the reader, and I am sure it will be fine for common storage tasks. If you have a NAS, you should invest in a faster interface with it, other than Wifi - cheaper and more effective, especially while Apple graces us with a built in Ethernet port, which could soon be gone!

 

[maflynn]

SSD gives you the best overall performance, the Fusion drive gives you near SSD speeds for some of your frequently access data. The question is, can you live within the constraints of the 256 or 512GB SSD? The 256GB is economical, I guess you can make a case for the 512, but the 1TB SSD is outrageously expensive.

I could not fit my data in the 512GB so I opted for the 2TB Fusion drive and I've been happy.

OP, since you have an iMac (as per your sig) with a Fusion drive, you should have a good feel about the Fusion drive, and whether it fits your needs or not.

 

[CWallace]

I went from 512GB SSD on my last 5K to 1TB SSD on this 5K since I also at times ran out of room for short-term projects (I have a 16TB Drobo 5D for long-term projects).

 

[throAU]

512 GB SSD in my experience is the sweet spot in terms of cost vs. utility at the moment.

256 GB is the bare minimum if you want to be comfortable for typical non intensive use (i.e., say 60 GB of OS and applications, another 60 GB or so for a couple of device back ups and the remainder for current data) and 1 TB is a luxury (un-necessary and currently a waste of money for most).

If you want to store bulk amounts of data, save the money you'd spend on going for massive amounts of SSD or compromising with a fusion drive and buy a NAS. Use the internal SSD for current projects, scratch space and applications and store your finished work on a multi-bay NAS with fault tolerance and back it up somewhere.

Attempting to store a heap of media that you rarely use on an SSD is just a waste of high speed (and expensive) storage.

If you're dealing with massive 4k video projects on a regular basis then fair enough maybe 1TB of SSD is worth it, but if you're not it's very likely that the content you want to stick on SSD is archive type data that will get little if any benefit from being on such high speed storage.

Especially in an iMac, where it's not as if you're going to be lugging the thing around and need to make sure you have all your data in the machine while you have it away from home. You do that with a Macbook, not an iMac and as such the requirement for it all (or a large amount of data) to be in the one box is much less.

2c.


edit:
YMMV and as above some may "need" huge SSD. But just think about how much data you really need to have on the machine, is all i'm saying because with a little house-keeping most people can get away with far less than 1 TB quite comfortably - and still have a decent (512 or 256 GB) SSD internally with a lot more than 1 TB available via a NAS for data that won't be too compromised when coming in from a NAS over gig ethernet.

 

[hfg]

I have a 1TB SSD 5K iMac. I configured it this way so as to have 750GB OS X and 250 GB Windows Bootcamp all on fast SSD. I then velcro attached a bus-powered 4TB Seagate FAST RAID-0 portable hard disk to the back of the iMac stand for library, archive, junk storage and a bootable clone backup. The external drive thus has ALL my data on it should something happen to the encrypted internal SSD requiring the iMac to be sent in for service.

It all is Time Machine backed up over the network to a MacMini server RAID-5 which serves all the household desktop and laptop computers.

This serves my photo and general needs, although I am not doing any "Pro" work on it.

 

[geekiemac]

I picked the 2 TB Fusion Drive. I don't do any professional work on my iMac, so the Fusion Drive suits me just fine. So far I'm quite happy with it even though I haven't tested its capacities to the maximum yet.