Why the Hate for Fusion Drives?

[whodatrr]

But again, these are decisions made on biases formed by people who haven't used the technology. OK, if they knew that they'd only ever need 256GB, they made an obvious choice. But if they chose a 256SSD over a 3TB Fusion because they suspected the Fusion would be noisy of kick out lots of heat, they were misinformed.

After years of living with a Fusion, I almost never hear or notice it, the lone exception being when spotlight is doing its thing. And what heat? Only time my fans kick into loud action if when I'm running Handbrake or doing other heavy video stuff, which has nothing to do with storage. I will submit to you that, had I spent the last three or so years with a 3TB SSD vs the 3TB Fusion, it would have made no appreciable difference in my life or workflow.

You're spot-on about backing up anyhow, and anyone who doesn't is foolish.

You are wrong - in many cases people choose the 256GB SSD over the 2TB Fusion in the standard configuration of the top end iMac. The costs are the same. Also in the lower end models, there is almost no price difference between the 256GB SSD and a fusion.

And in the end it doesn't matter if you have your data internally or on external drives, you have to make regular backups anyway. But besides the possibility that spinning HDs might fail more often than a SSD (I don't think they do), you can't deny that spinning HDs tend to be louder and slower over the time. They are even louder if they are brand new. And THAT is something many people just don't want anymore.

Thats why I banned all of my spinning drives from my desktop.

 

[antipodean]

I'm a little surprised not to see more mention of bootcamp. If you make any significant use of bootcamp windows, the speed gains of pure SSD over the HDD of fusion will be worth quite a bit surely? Perhaps bootcamp is less widespread than I imagine.

Although I'm a self-confessed pure SSD person (1TB in each of my iMacs and 512GB in my rMBP), I have played around with a 2TB fusion at the Apple Store. I was impressed with the the speed. No bootcamp there of course.

 

[twilexia]

I'm a little surprised not to see more mention of bootcamp. If you make any significant use of bootcamp windows, the speed gains of pure SSD over the HDD of fusion will be worth quite a bit surely? Perhaps bootcamp is less widespread than I imagine.

Although I'm a self-confessed pure SSD person (1TB in each of my iMacs and 512GB in my rMBP), I have played around with a 2TB fusion at the Apple Store. I was impressed with the the speed. No bootcamp there of course.

Yes, if you use Bootcamp, the SSD is a clear cut 100% choice, just as the 24GB SSD Fusion drive and pure HDD drives are 100% inferior to the other choices and that you should 100% be buying the 8GB RAM model and upgrade later. But most people buy a mac to use the OS, not to run Windows.

 

[whodatrr]

Yes, Bootcamp is a valid reason to consider pure SSD over Fusion. In my case, I moistly use PCs (My SP3) for Windows. But I have had to use a VM a bit over my Fusion years, running Win7 and the beta of Win 10. The Fusion worked just fine in those cases, although the Win 10 beta had a few hiccups on its own.

I prefer Win in a VM, because I'm usually sharing info between apps across OS X and Win. Actually, in that case, a VM is better than my dedicated PC. But people who want pure bootcamp will find that their windows system is still running on a spinner.

I'm a little surprised not to see more mention of bootcamp. If you make any significant use of bootcamp windows, the speed gains of pure SSD over the HDD of fusion will be worth quite a bit surely? Perhaps bootcamp is less widespread than I imagine.

Although I'm a self-confessed pure SSD person (1TB in each of my iMacs and 512GB in my rMBP), I have played around with a 2TB fusion at the Apple Store. I was impressed with the the speed. No bootcamp there of course.

 

[hifimacianer]

But again, these are decisions made on biases formed by people who haven't used the technology. OK, if they knew that they'd only ever need 256GB, they made an obvious choice. But if they chose a 256SSD over a 3TB Fusion because they suspected the Fusion would be noisy of kick out lots of heat, they were misinformed.

I have used an iMac with standard spinning HD for some years, and I also have used external HDs. Thats why I know that they are louder even brand new and getting even louder ans slower over the years. Every single standard HD I owned had this issue. Heat wasn't a problem for me by the way. So it's no bias, it's experience!

And even if I don't have used a FusionDrive by myself, that behaviour can be expected over the time, because in the end it's just a spinning HD inside with some SSD cache.

I know that a 2TB Fusion will probably be OK for my needs (speed wise), because I actually also have a 128GB SSD in my iMac, and it's large enough for OSX and all of my Apps. That wont be a problem. But I just don't want to have a Spinning drive inside, that WILL be louder and slower over the time, with no chance to legally replace it in the first 3 years (Apple Care). And even after 3 years it's a little surgery to open it.

I will submit to you that, had I spent the last three or so years with a 3TB SSD vs the 3TB Fusion, it would have made no appreciable difference in my life or workflow.

How can you know this?
OK, it may be that you don't have many files that really need the speed of a SSD, or that These files fit in the 128GB SSD part of the fusion. I am also running my iTunes library from my NAS without any Problems, Gigabit Ethernet is fast enough for that files. My Photos Library (JPG only) is also loading fast enough from the external FireWire HD I used many years.

But I have a large CaptureOne Pro catalog (like Adobe Lightroom, for RAW editing) with all of my RAW files, and big preview files. And that catalog really needs fast SSD Speed. It's just too slow to work with it from a spinning HD. And that catalog is a lot bigger than the 128GB fusion SSD, so you would definitely observe a difference between a Fusion and a pure SSD.

 

[AppleHater]

Two things that I want to point out In this discussion.
First, we should consider random access speed more than top transfer speed unless your daily life is moving a bunch of video files around. Say if you have a library of tens of thousands of photos. Or, iTunes with ten thousand songs.

Also, magnetic drives slow down once more than half of the space is filled up. So, what the performance is like with your fusion drive is like 2/3 filled should be considered.

 

[whodatrr]

What I'm saying is that I don't 'notice the noise of these Fusions. I do notice the noise when I fire up an external USB drive. I do not tend to notice the noise my Fusion drive makes when it's going about its business, except maybe when spotlight is crawling or a couple other scenarios. Even then, it's barely noticeable and is more of a curiosity (eg. "am I hearing drive noise?")- and yeah, I lived through about 25yrs of noisy spinners too. I don't know how much of that reduced noise has to do with the SSD portion offloading tasks, or the acoustics of the iMac, or a quieter drive? No idea why it's so much quieter, but I will submit that it is. Any other Fusion owners care to chime in on this, as it seems to be a major perceived flaw?

Regarding the files I have and the way I use them, vs yours, there is no right or wrong way to do things. On my side, I find iTunes over NAS to be like paint drying. I also don't like dealing with lots of external drives and clutter. But that's just me.

I also do photography and video, and find the Fusion drive perfect for that. It's big enough, fast enough, and I always know where all my resources and projects are. Yes, opening up old projects or raw files may require some HDD access, but it's really no an issue for me. But YMMV. Again, there is no right or wrong approach.

I have used an iMac with standard spinning HD for some years, and I also have used external HDs. Thats why I know that they are louder even brand new and getting even louder ans slower over the years. Every single standard HD I owned had this issue. Heat wasn't a problem for me by the way. So it's no bias, it's experience!

And even if I don't have used a FusionDrive by myself, that behaviour can be expected over the time, because in the end it's just a spinning HD inside with some SSD cache.

I know that a 2TB Fusion will probably be OK for my needs (speed wise), because I actually also have a 128GB SSD in my iMac, and it's large enough for OSX and all of my Apps. That wont be a problem. But I just don't want to have a Spinning drive inside, that WILL be louder and slower over the time, with no chance to legally replace it in the first 3 years (Apple Care). And even after 3 years it's a little surgery to open it.




How can you know this?
OK, it may be that you don't have many files that really need the speed of a SSD, or that These files fit in the 128GB SSD part of the fusion. I am also running my iTunes library from my NAS without any Problems, Gigabit Ethernet is fast enough for that files. My Photos Library (JPG only) is also loading fast enough from the external FireWire HD I used many years.

But I have a large CaptureOne Pro catalog (like Adobe Lightroom, for RAW editing) with all of my RAW files, and big preview files. And that catalog really needs fast SSD Speed. It's just too slow to work with it from a spinning HD. And that catalog is a lot bigger than the 128GB fusion SSD, so you would definitely observe a difference between a Fusion and a pure SSD.

 

[Tanax]

Has people actually been saying they "hate" Fusion Drive? I've only seen people suggesting SSDs over FD, not because they hate FD but simply because SSDs are considered being generally better in everything apart from capacity vs cost ratio (which can in most cases be circumvented by storing your media elsewhere)?

 

[Wahlstrm]

My Mini has:
256 SSD for OSX+Apps.
256 SSD for Active projects.
3TB HDD for Short term storage.
4TB HDD for Time Machine.

If I went with a fusion drive I would have files all over the place, some on fast storage and some on slow storage.Some apps would open quick and others would be slow.. Not very nice, I like consistency

 

[joema2]

...have you ever suffered a moment where you stopped and thought, "damn, I wish I got the full SSD?" And I ask this to not just casual users but also gamers and professionals who produce video and audio content.

I have five Macs -- three have SSD and two are 3TB Fusion Drive. The 3TB FD is very good. My two latest Macs (2015 MBP and 2015 retina iMac 27) have SSD simply because it made more sense. You obviously want SSD on a laptop. On a desktop if you deal with large amounts of data that won't fit on a 3TB SSD (or might not in the future), then why not get an SSD since your data will be external anyway.

From a performance standpoint doing heavy duty video editing with FCP X, I really don't see much difference between FD and SSD when the data is external. With SSD, apps launch a little faster but FD is still pretty quick. The SSD iMac boots a little faster but the FD iMac still boots pretty fast.

From an acoustic noise standpoint, I have side-by-side on my desk both 2013 iMac with 3TB FD and 2015 iMac 27 with 1TB SSD. I cannot hear any difference. Maybe it's masked by my Pegasus R4 RAID array, but it is not that loud.

FD is *way* faster than a regular HDD for most common activities. SSD can produce much higher benchmark numbers than FD but this doesn't always translate into a major real-world difference.

If people blow their entire budget on an SSD iMac and can only afford a slow 5400 rpm bus-powered USB drive, they may experience worse performance overall than a 3TB Fusion Drive iMac.

OTOH a fast USB 3 drive isn't that expensive. I've tested several fast ones including the 1TB HGST Touro S and the 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast.

Although my experienced with FD has been pretty good, I am skeptical about the performance of the new 1TB FD with only 24GB of SSD.

 

[winston1236]

I love my 3TB fusion drive, my programs all open lightning fast and while a pure SSD would be slightly faster for some things it's negated by the cost increase.

 

[The Doctor11]

I love my fusion drive! I'm getting a very fast computer and a lot of storage. It really is the "best of both worlds".

 

[fruitpunch.ben]

I will say that I am not a Fusion hater. I don't own one, and decided to go with a 512 as it was available on a refurb machine.



You are trying to let a piece of software inside the OS decide onto what it thinks is important and with the lack of published logic behind it you can play out the scenarios.

For example:
- Does the software know or understand that although the itunes library gets accessed on a regular basis, there is no need for it to be located on the SSD?
- how much free space is left on the SSD portion for writes? does it have some AI to know how much space is needed for this user, or is it a fixed amount?
- Does it put all the apps onto SSD to speed up loading of all apps even though many will never get used? How about the libraries or the web cache?

If you really think that Apple's software engineers are not smart enough to think of these ridiculously common usage scenarios, and program the software to deal with them (like iTunes music files always go on the HDD) then you shouldn't be buying an iMac, because why buy a computer programmed by idiots?

I think it's interesting that almost everyone who has a fusion drive likes it (from what I've seen on this forum) while everyone who doesn't have it seems to hate it. One IT guy in my office absolutely hates it, but he's never even used one before.

The primary question is, and I ask this to fusion drive owners who have used the fusion drive with 128GB SSD, have you ever suffered a moment where you stopped and thought, "damn, I wish I got the full SSD?" And I ask this to not just casual users but also gamers and professionals who produce video and audio content.

Thanks a lot for this thread. Until now I had determined to get a 512GB SSD and use my 3TB external for photos, music, movies, etc. because I was afraid the speed decrease would be noticeable, especially after using it for a while. This thread proves your point. Literally all those arguing against fusion haven't used it, and all those who have say it is still blazing fast and they'd buy it again. So I'm convinced.
The only thing I'd be interested in is a benchmark test done months (years) later, to see if filling up the SSD cache part slows it down once everything is full. Is it possible to do this with your old fusion drive and see if someone benchmarked it when new (I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere)?

 

[AppleHater]

I have five Macs -- three have SSD and two are 3TB Fusion Drive. The 3TB FD is very good. My two latest Macs (2015 MBP and 2015 retina iMac 27) have SSD simply because it made more sense. You obviously want SSD on a laptop. On a desktop if you deal with large amounts of data that won't fit on a 3TB SSD (or might not in the future), then why not get an SSD since your data will be external anyway.

From a performance standpoint doing heavy duty video editing with FCP X, I really don't see much difference between FD and SSD when the data is external. With SSD, apps launch a little faster but FD is still pretty quick. The SSD iMac boots a little faster but the FD iMac still boots pretty fast.

From an acoustic noise standpoint, I have side-by-side on my desk both 2013 iMac with 3TB FD and 2015 iMac 27 with 1TB SSD. I cannot hear any difference. Maybe it's masked by my Pegasus R4 RAID array, but it is not that loud.

FD is *way* faster than a regular HDD for most common activities. SSD can produce much higher benchmark numbers than FD but this doesn't always translate into a major real-world difference.

If people blow their entire budget on an SSD iMac and can only afford a slow 5400 rpm bus-powered USB drive, they may experience worse performance overall than a 3TB Fusion Drive iMac.

OTOH a fast USB 3 drive isn't that expensive. I've tested several fast ones including the 1TB HGST Touro S and the 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast.

Although my experienced with FD has been pretty good, I am skeptical about the performance of the new 1TB FD with only 24GB of SSD.

How is the reading performance of a fusion drive while it's more than half filled?

 

[aevan]

I ask this to fusion drive owners who have used the fusion drive with 128GB SSD, have you ever suffered a moment where you stopped and thought, "damn, I wish I got the full SSD?"

No.

 

[whodatrr]

And that's the main reason this thread was started - there just seemed to be so much misinformation spreading around about Fusion drive performance.

If someone is a serious pro who's doing 4K video and already has a TB2 SSD RAID array hanging off the back of their iMac, go SSD all the way. If someone is a dabbler who only expects to have less than 256 or 512 GB of data on their internal drive years from now, again SSD is probably for you. But if you're an enthusiast who dabbles in video and other creative apps, and you expect to have more than 512G a couple years form now, then the Fusion drive is worth considering (2TB or 3TB). Most will not likely notice the difference in performance (again, most of my machines are pure SSDs), and the capacity is a nice thing to have. It's also nice to have most of your data close, not having to deal with mounting NAS drives, cluttered USB drives, or cloud services.

My main frustration with spinning drives has been: slow boots and wakes, slow apps launches, weird stalls while the drive is rewriting or defragging, slow opening of files I use often, etc. Fusion has solved all of these, for me. Yeah, if I'm opening a 5GB movie that I haven't touched for a year, it may take an extra second or two. But most of the stuff I do daily flies like the wind.

Not saying Fusion is the greatest thing since sliced bread, just that it's a good compromise for now - until SSD prices drop some more and capacity is closer to what spinners provide.

Regarding degraded performant ever time, my experience is that the caching gets better. But again, that's nothing I sweat - because that vast majority of my data has been in the cache.

I went with a 3TB and allocated the extra $1,000+ I saved by not having to buy the 1TB SSD bump and a 1TB external SSD toward an open-box 2015 MacBook, which I got at BestBuy for under a grand. And still, I have an extra TB of storage, than I would have had going the other way. OK, that's just me justifying - I had to have the new MacBook... LOL

Thanks a lot for this thread. Until now I had determined to get a 512GB SSD and use my 3TB external for photos, music, movies, etc. because I was afraid the speed decrease would be noticeable, especially after using it for a while. This thread proves your point. Literally all those arguing against fusion haven't used it, and all those who have say it is still blazing fast and they'd buy it again. So I'm convinced.
The only thing I'd be interested in is a benchmark test done months (years) later, to see if filling up the SSD cache part slows it down once everything is full. Is it possible to do this with your old fusion drive and see if someone benchmarked it when new (I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere)?

 

[joema2]

How is the reading performance of a fusion drive while it's more than half filled?

That varies based on whether the files being accessed are in the SSD or not, which you can't really control. But in general if FD is over half full the performance is still pretty good. It does not dramatically degrade as it approaches 90% full like a pure HDD does.

 

[Evil Spoonman]

I believe the design of the drive is that the OS is on the flash storage, and the OS is continually being accessed. There are frameworks, kexts and other portions of the OS that are actively being retrieved AFAIK.

Even if the OS isn't on the flash storage, 24GB is tiny and will not hold a fraction of what I work on, so either way its a bad option.

Fusion Drive is part of the CoreStorage logical volume manager that functions at the block level. "The System" is not really a monolithic singular file, and even if it was only the blocks you actually used often would be placed on to the SSD. The same is true of something like a VM. Only the important parts of that single large file are stored on the SSD. The OS install is not that huge, and your computer only uses some subset of those files. I would guesstimate that the system consumes 8GB max on your SSD (probably less). For a very casual user this 24GB/1TB setup would probably feel very much like an SSD. My dad, for example, might find it to be quite zippy. On the other hand I would be very upset by it.

I will say that I am not a Fusion hater. I don't own one, and decided to go with a 512 as it was available on a refurb machine.



There are however those of us who have spent the time to understand how the system works. It really falls into the same category as large drive cache that was part of higher end server raid controllers. They do work well to a point, but as a drive fills they can become less and less effective. You are dealing with a pre-emtive hit ratio and best guess as to what data will be wanted next.

You are trying to let a piece of software inside the OS decide onto what it thinks is important and with the lack of published logic behind it you can play out the scenarios.

For example:

A person has a fusion drive filled with 300gb of data. They have an itunes library that is 150gb in size, and listen to thier music on a daily basis. The whole drive is simply too large to fit onto the SSD part of the fusion, so what happens? The user does average home use documents, surfs the internet, and plays a few games.

- Does the software know or understand that although the itunes library gets accessed on a regular basis, there is no need for it to be located on the SSD?
- how much free space is left on the SSD portion for writes? does it have some AI to know how much space is needed for this user, or is it a fixed amount?
- Does it put all the apps onto SSD to speed up loading of all apps even though many will never get used? How about the libraries or the web cache?

Sure, a fusion drive does offer a whole load of advantages in the form a whole load of storage for a relatively cheeper price. For the average user it makes a load of sense in they can have everything in one box that looks tidy and no bother. If you are a user who doesn't keep a whole bunch of files, then it would be more logical and faster if your storage needs can be more than met by a 512ssd to go pure ssd. If you are a buisness or IT type person, then more than likely you will have an external drive hooked up to your iMac anyways as you will be logical and back things up. So if you are already compartmentalizing everything, going to an SSD only with external storage for older documents or data that is not required all the time might be faster to do it yourself.

It all comes down to knowing your own needs and how much you want to put into it as that controls what you get out.

I don't think you really understand how Fusion Drive works. It isn't deciding what it thinks is important, it is just moving the things you access often. You are deciding what you think is important in your usage. Almost everybody uses a consistent set of applications and documents so this works well.

When you load an application it will also pull a bunch of dynamic libraries and cached data in with it. These are also stored on the SSD so application loads are fast. It doesn't matter if your music library is 300GB, only the songs you listen to often are on the SSD. Your photo library is not on the SSD, only the generated image previews are. I assume the swap file is also kept on the SSD. A lot of access load is removed from the HDD. So even though you sometimes have to reach out to it, you're not thrashing so it is as fast as it can reasonably be.

It also does not behave like a traditional cache. The contents of the SSD are not mirrors of what exists on the HDD. CoreStorage actually moves the blocks across and shifts some other blocks over to the HDD to make room. Your disk is effectively 1.1TB rather than 1TB+128GB Cache. I'm sure it keeps a storage buffer open for incoming writes. If memory serves, Fusion Drive will stream up to 4GB to the SSD before pushing the rest of the stream to the HDD.

For most users, most of the time, Fusion Drive is a very effective technology. Most people who don't like it either haven't tried it or are operating on a placebo impression. In the end going all SSD is better, but this is why I restate the fact that Fusion Drive is a transitional technology.

 

[henry72]

I don't hate it, I actually think Apple "should" put it in all iMac and Mac mini, especially since they downloaded 24GB Flash for the 1TB option. Come on Apple, HDD is an absolute terrible user experience

I ordered a 3TB FD in 2013 and the biggest disappointment was the waking up time from sleep, it was slow and quite loud as you would expect from a hard drive so I returned it. I had a MacBook Pro 15" Retina so I felt like it was a downgrade.

It's a great option for most people but for me, I want to choose the best possible for this spectacular iMac 5K

 

[whodatrr]

Sounds like something was wrong with your system? My late 2012 i7 with 3TB wakes in about 3 seconds. Main screen fires up in a bit over a second, but my two external display take another two or so to wake. But that's not exactly what I'd consider ra painful amount of time.

I don't hate it, I actually think Apple "should" put it in all iMac and Mac mini, especially since they downloaded 24GB Flash for the 1TB option. Come on Apple, HDD is an absolute terrible user experience

I ordered a 3TB FD in 2013 and the biggest disappointment was the waking up time from sleep, it was slow and quite loud as you would expect from a hard drive so I returned it. I had a MacBook Pro 15" Retina so I felt like it was a downgrade.

It's a great option for most people but for me, I want to choose the best possible for this spectacular iMac 5K

 

[twilexia]

I have five Macs -- three have SSD and two are 3TB Fusion Drive. The 3TB FD is very good. My two latest Macs (2015 MBP and 2015 retina iMac 27) have SSD simply because it made more sense. You obviously want SSD on a laptop. On a desktop if you deal with large amounts of data that won't fit on a 3TB SSD (or might not in the future), then why not get an SSD since your data will be external anyway.

From a performance standpoint doing heavy duty video editing with FCP X, I really don't see much difference between FD and SSD when the data is external. With SSD, apps launch a little faster but FD is still pretty quick. The SSD iMac boots a little faster but the FD iMac still boots pretty fast.

From an acoustic noise standpoint, I have side-by-side on my desk both 2013 iMac with 3TB FD and 2015 iMac 27 with 1TB SSD. I cannot hear any difference. Maybe it's masked by my Pegasus R4 RAID array, but it is not that loud.

FD is *way* faster than a regular HDD for most common activities. SSD can produce much higher benchmark numbers than FD but this doesn't always translate into a major real-world difference.

If people blow their entire budget on an SSD iMac and can only afford a slow 5400 rpm bus-powered USB drive, they may experience worse performance overall than a 3TB Fusion Drive iMac.

OTOH a fast USB 3 drive isn't that expensive. I've tested several fast ones including the 1TB HGST Touro S and the 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast.

Although my experienced with FD has been pretty good, I am skeptical about the performance of the new 1TB FD with only 24GB of SSD.

Joe, thanks for the fantastic answer. It's truly valuable (for me) to see the perspective of someone who has used both and does a lot of video editing. I think at this point it's well-agreed on that the i7 is a must have, the ram should be upgraded, but the toss-up is in the area of the GPU (M395 vs M395x) and the storage (512/1TB SSD vs 2TB/3TB Fusion drive).

If you were doing 1080p video editing and all of your files were on your internal drive, would you see a significant increase in performance (for rendering/previews) having SSD instead of the FD?

 

[henry72]

Sounds like something was wrong with your system? My late 2012 i7 with 3TB wakes in about 3 seconds. Main screen fires up in a bit over a second, but my two external display take another two or so to wake. But that's not exactly what I'd consider ra painful amount of time.

3 seconds is defiantly acceptable. I think the problem occurred every morning when I tried to wake it up, take about 10 seconds but it feels like a long time when you need to use it. I can also hear to HDD waking up too.

 

[antman2x2]

The problem is that you're still relying on a spinning drive which is literally a ticking time bomb.

 

[AppleHater]

The problem is that you're still relying on a spinning drive which is literally a ticking time bomb.

To be fair, SSD won't last forever either.

 

[riviera74]

To be fair, SSD won't last forever either.

Nothing truly lasts forever. Then again, I will buy an iMac with 256/512GB SSD for one reason: I already have a 4TB external drive for storage and backup/