Thoughts on Fusion Drive After 1 Year in Wild

[thedatapusher]

Now that the fusion drives have been in use and available for a while now, what are the thoughts on them. Are they fast, deliver as promised, reliable and secure or are they a hassle and better off avoided.

Thanks.

 

[dasx]

I do not own one, my girlfriend does though. (We live together so I use it quite regularly). I just ordered a retina iMac, and I went for a 512GB SSD (couldn't afford the 1TB one).

Why? I don't know. Using the FD isn't the same as using the 256GB SSD in mi Mini somehow. Couldn't really tell how different it is, it just is.

I think that if you're good at managing your stuff (files and media and all that) and if you can afford an SSD, it's still better the SSD + external RAID5 solution.

 

[bjmoose]

I have a 3T Fusion late 2012 iMac, and a shiny 5K 1T SSD iMac. The SSD shines when there are a lot of different things being shuffled to and from disk, more than the SSD cache for the Fusion drive can keep around.

If you don't access most of the HDD, use a restricted set of programs, then the Fusion is a great deal. If you tend to have a lot of things going on, the caching isn't as effective.