Thanks Jim
I tried Time Machine , it is just a bit tedious and the OSX does not report the correct disk space consumed so I had no idea if my backup drive is near full. Because it uses dynamic links (pointers). I found the space used increases everyday by quite a large amount (it probably didn't) so I stopped using it.
I'll try again.
TC
It's like the Fusion drive - just don't worry about it!
Time Machine creates what looks like a complete snapshot of your hard drive now. Plus a complete snapshot of your hard drive of an hour ago. One of two hours ago. ... One of 24 hours ago. One of the day before, for several days. Then weekly ones. If you add up all the sizes, it gets enormous.
It will eventually take up all the space on your backup drive. That's nothing to worry about, it's absolutely normal. It's supposed to happen. No point in having a 1TB backup drive if a few hundred GB are not used. When Time Machine runs out of space, it will create more space by removing the oldest backups.
Even so, why didn't they use a 7200rpm HDD + SSD Fusion? that would be even better than the current Fusion, wouldn't it?
Not necessarily. First, there are no 2.5inch 1 TB 7200 rpm drives. Second, the highest density drives are 5400 rpm. That's always the case. The highest density drives are always at lower rpm, but read as much data per second than the lower density higher rpm drives. There's a disadvantage when you access lots of small files - but you don't have any small files on the HD portion of a Fusion drive!
Finally, why not giving the option of a HDD and a SSD (separate), is it a contraint in space available in the anorexic "released" iMac?
There are people asking for that. I consider them to be control freaks. I wouldn't want to waste my time arranging files between two drives. In a Fusion drive, the SSD drive is always close to full, so you are actually getting the speed advantage from the whole 128 GB that you paid for. If you manage it manually, either the SSD drive isn't full, so you paid for many GBs that you are not actually using, or it is full, and you keep having to move things to the HD.
The end result is you can have the 15GB of game data for the levels you're no longer playing on the HDD, while the 5GB of data for current levels, multiplayer data, app, etc. can all live on the SDD. Or you could have this year's and newly imported photos live on the SDD while the 40GB of photos from the past 10 years live on the HDD. Fusion can optimize your file-system performance at the sub-file level. And this is more important once you've hit the limit of the SSD portion of your Fusion Drive.
Very well said. And if you use Parallels or VMWare Fusion (what a coincidence with the names) to run Windows, they will also benefit from the Fusion drive without any effort.