To Fusion or not?

[rawweb]

I'm taking a dive and upgrading an old 2012 27" to a 256gb SSD via a OWC kit..

It shipped with a 1TB spinner, the question is...leave the SSD standalone as a boot volume, or mesh the two as a Fusion? I've honestly never had a computer with a Fusion setup, so have no experience with a Fusion...this machine isn't my primary machine at all so not worried about raw speed...what kind of performance would I be looking at if I fused them vs standalone SSD?

 

[fusionid]

The answer like always is it depends. Google fusion drive and you will find lots of people complaining. Personally I use my computer for logic X primarly so loading samples I wouldn't do it.

I drop all the non important stuff on the spinner and all the must load stat runs off the SSD.

 

[maflynn]

Fusion is a great mechanism that provides near SSD performance with a combined SSD+HD. How much data does your computer hold? That is, will all of it fit on the SSD? If not, then going to Fusion makes sense.

If it were me, I'd buy the SSD that would hold all of my data, and use the spinning disk to store any old data that is not used often or at all.

 

[rawweb]

Fusion is a great mechanism that provides near SSD performance with a combined SSD+HD. How much data does your computer hold? That is, will all of it fit on the SSD? If not, then going to Fusion makes sense.

If it were me, I'd buy the SSD that would hold all of my data, and use the spinning disk to store any old data that is not used often or at all.

Fair enough! I think I'll set them up separately, might help my resale anyway!

 

[vkd]

Just Fuse (make a Fusion drive) and forget. You'll get near-SSD performance. If you're worried, keep a backup. Bas.

 

[fathergll]

Set them up separate. I've used a fusion drive in my iMac for a couple years now and i'd rather of had just a pure SSD.

 

[cynics]

I'd probably leave them separate. Keep media or other things that don't require high speed on the HDD like an iTunes library and/or movie collection.

And keep the OS and programs on the SSD.

Actually I'd probably do whatever is easiest but whatever won't matter too much in the end imo.

 

[oneMadRssn]

It shipped with a 1TB spinner, the question is...leave the SSD standalone as a boot volume, or mesh the two as a Fusion?

I recently set up a Fusion drive on my Mac Mini. Essentially I got tired of micro-managing what was on the SSD and what was on the spinner. So far so good. Overall it's about as fast as it was when I had the only the OS and apps on the SSD.

Here is my argument for why a Fusion Drive is better than keeping separate drives: To get the most bang out of my SSD, I should cede micro-managing control to OS X.

The advantage of an SSD is speed. In a Fusion Drive setup, you get to maximize the quantity of data that benefits from that speed. With Fusion, presumably close to the full capacity of the SSD will benefit from that speed. If I manually manage two separate drives, I will not fill up the entire SSD and thus only some fraction of it's capacity will be used for the higher-speed benefit. From what I have read, OS X is actually very good at determining which data to store on the SSD for the maximum speed benefit. Thus, by letting OS X figure out how to fill it up and use the SSD, I will get the most benefit from it. Also, it seems easier and simpler.

To alleviate the unreliability of it, I have good backups. As should everyone always.

 

[bent christian]

I'm taking a dive and upgrading an old 2012 27" to a 256gb SSD via a OWC kit..

It shipped with a 1TB spinner, the question is...leave the SSD standalone as a boot volume, or mesh the two as a Fusion? I've honestly never had a computer with a Fusion setup, so have no experience with a Fusion...this machine isn't my primary machine at all so not worried about raw speed...what kind of performance would I be looking at if I fused them vs standalone SSD?

Since you won't get the benefit of current PCIe speeds I would leave the two drives unfused.

A going-on-five-year-old hard drive could die at any time. Fusion means, that when one drive goes, files split between the two are lost. You may even lose everything on both drives. The benefit of speed is negligible. Risk of failure is significant.