Why the Hate for Fusion Drives?

[maflynn]

I don't think it's commonly accepted that the 24GB is worse than the 128GB one. The only question is by how much. Obviously this depends on 1) the usage profile and 2) the behavior of FD.

I played with the iMacs at the apple store a while ago, and found that depending on the configuration, starting up an app was horrid. I fired up Excel and Word and was mightily disappointed in seeing how long it took. I also don't know the logic in how the fusion drive works, but I want to set myself up for success, so that's why I'm opting for the 2TB version

 

[Weaselboy]

I played with the iMacs at the apple store a while ago, and found that depending on the configuration, starting up an app was horrid. I fired up Excel and Word and was mightily disappointed in seeing how long it took. I also don't know the logic in how the fusion drive works, but I want to set myself up for success, so that's why I'm opting for the 2TB version

I'm not sure how valid a test that is in the Apple store though. In theory if after coffee each morning you launch Excel and Word then go to work, after a time the Fusion drive would move bits of Word and Excel to the flash portion of the Fusion drive so they would launch faster on subsequent launches. Just walking up to a Mac in the Apple store and launching Word and Excel it is very likely those bits will not be on the flash storage and will launch from the hard drive portion.

I don't disagree that in theory a 128GB flash based Fusion setup would work better than a 24GB one, but there is a long thread here with several comments from users of the new 24GB based Fusion drive and every single one of them commented it worked well and several commented it worked as well as a pure SSD solution in day to day usage.

 

[makrom]

Yeah, how well FDs work definitely depends on estimated usage, based on gathered statistics. With what's basically random usage, it won't have learned anything useful and will likely be slow.

I heard from several people that they are happy with the 24GB version, but I'm quite sure that they have a rather light usage profile (typical browsing, mailing, Word, listening to music).

I got the 128GB one and am definitely happy with it as well but I don't think that 24GB would work for me. I do RAW photo and 4k video editing as an amateur, some gaming including screen capturing, sometimes handling 2-3 1080p or 4k videos at once (playing, cutting, reviewing), often browsing simultaneously with a ton of tabs open, voice chatting, programming, remote operating other computers, sometimes with Windows in Parallels if I need a non OS X program, and some other minor tasks.
To somepeople this might sound like a heavy usage profile, but it doesn't seem to be I/O dependant enough to be slowed down much by the FD.

 

[jmgregory1]

I'm not sure how valid a test that is in the Apple store though. In theory if after coffee each morning you launch Excel and Word then go to work, after a time the Fusion drive would move bits of Word and Excel to the flash portion of the Fusion drive so they would launch faster on subsequent launches. Just walking up to a Mac in the Apple store and launching Word and Excel it is very likely those bits will not be on the flash storage and will launch from the hard drive portion.

I don't disagree that in theory a 128GB flash based Fusion setup would work better than a 24GB one, but there is a long thread here with several comments from users of the new 24GB based Fusion drive and every single one of them commented it worked well and several commented it worked as well as a pure SSD solution in day to day usage.

Having one of the original 1TB FD iMacs (late 2012 / early 2013), I've been nothing but impressed by the speed it operates. I worked on it exclusively for about 9 months (another co-worker is using it now), and it was as fast in accessing files and starting apps as my 256gb ssd driven 2011 MBA or my now 500gb ssd 2013 15" rMBP. Given the workflow is very constant day to day, I have to assume that the 128gb ssd portion of the FD is holding daily apps and files, because there is zero lag.

I'm not so sure the same would be true with the new 24gb ssd FD. Perhaps Apple studied actual performance of the 80% usage and determined that 24gb was enough to not negatively effect performance and customer experience, but given they still offer the larger 128gb ssd in the 2TB FD drives, something tells me they're simply reducing cost and that there will indeed be a performance hit on the smaller FD drives. Whether it's enough to be a negative for the vast majority of users or not, we won't know unless they change things and go back to the larger ssd on all models.

My guess is that as ssd prices continue to fall, the FD drive will get phased out, but that could take a few more years yet. And as long as the market for all computers still includes spinning hard drives, Apple can offer it without fear of looking like they're behind the times. Fusion Drive bought them time with a lower cost speed advantage while still offering large data storage, which I thought and still think was a brilliant idea. It still makes me scratch my head when I see posts on here about people wanting to split the FD so they can choose which apps / data is stored on the ssd. If they simply used the drive as it was created, they'd recognize that the OS does a great job moving things back and forth so that you have what feels like an all ssd experience, but still have the large capacity of the old HD drives.

 

[daniel.hershman]

After reading all the comments in this thread I finally decided to get a 27 inch iMac with a 3tb fusion drive. My main use is Lightroom and PS, with a catalog that's currently 1.5 gigs and about 2 tb of raw images. A 1tb SSD would have added another $500 and I'd have to also purchase a RAID with at least 6tb of storage just to hold my files and provide backup, adding another $400-600. With the fusion drive configuration I'm saving on the initial cash outlay and I can keep using my current Lacie 3tb as a time machine backup.

I'm sure that SSDs are faster, but I'm not so certain that l/O is all that much a bottleneck for the work that I do. At least not important enough to drop another $1000 at this time.

It will arrive on Tuesday, so we'll see how it goes.

 

[maflynn]

I'm not sure how valid a test that is in the Apple store

I understand but that's the best I could do in my own research. The issue I had was that the performance was horrid (performance in terms of app start up).

The one thing it did show as that any apps starting up off the hard drive will be slow.

 

[scottsjack]

I played with the iMacs at the apple store a while ago, and found that depending on the configuration, starting up an app was horrid. I fired up Excel and Word and was mightily disappointed in seeing how long it took. I also don't know the logic in how the fusion drive works, but I want to set myself up for success, so that's why I'm opting for the 2TB version

Office apps always took a lot longer to open on my Macs than on my PC, a lot longer. I just tried on the 2012 MBP with SSD that I'm writing this on and they now open almost instantly. Maybe the recent updates fixed the problem.

 

[maflynn]

Office apps always took a lot longer to open on my Macs than on my PC, a lot longer. I just tried on the 2012 MBP with SSD that I'm writing this on and they now open almost instantly. Maybe the recent updates fixed the problem.

No question, but I they do open very quickly on my 2012 rMBP, and when I visited the apple store, they were taking about 15 to 20 seconds (or there abouts). So much so, it was very noticeable.

 

[makrom]

I'm curious maybe if you wanted to run a test? Maybe time how long it takes to copy 50GB of video from your fusion drive to the T1 and then I think we can do a simple 50,000 MB/time to get the MB/S. Of course part of this will be affected by the SSD speed but it would be interesting to see. Thank you!

Ok I still owe you that test:
Writing 20 files with a total of 66.85GB from the external SSD to the FD took 7m31s or about 150MB/s. My FD is filled around 1TB, I assume that the SSD is mostly filled and wasn't used for big new files. I don't think that HDD fragmentation was an issue, the drive is still quite new and I didn't do that much writing and deleting yet, it mostly just filled up to the point it is at now.

The results are a little slower than I expected, but I did notice that the speeds weren't very constant Sometimes it seemed like more than 250MB/s, sometimes less than 100.
All in all this is still quicker than anything from where I will copy files from/to, except for this eSSD. My fastest SD cards are up to around 90MB/s and that's where I copy most data from.

 

[Cbdboz]

"Yes I need a lot of storage space that's why I have (2) 10TB Thunderbolt 2 RAID1 mirror drives (5TB ea) that I store all my huge amounts of data. But things I work on every day and all my current projects are held locally (and backed up) so I can get the best performance all the time.
"

how does fusion work when you have external drives...i am thinking of adding external drives for Media...such as movies and photos....so does that mean that all Photo and video files have to go direct onto the external HDD or do they automatically go on to the internal fusion...and you have to house clean from time to time to ensure the fusion doers not fill up...and move files internal to external??? (e.g. do you have iPhoto files bot hon internal and external..but it is always a manual move exercise??)

..also, would fusion drive be seen as 1 drive, and was to move content over??

 

[twilexia]

Ok I still owe you that test:
Writing 20 files with a total of 66.85GB from the external SSD to the FD took 7m31s or about 150MB/s. My FD is filled around 1TB, I assume that the SSD is mostly filled and wasn't used for big new files. I don't think that HDD fragmentation was an issue, the drive is still quite new and I didn't do that much writing and deleting yet, it mostly just filled up to the point it is at now.

The results are a little slower than I expected, but I did notice that the speeds weren't very constant Sometimes it seemed like more than 250MB/s, sometimes less than 100.
All in all this is still quicker than anything from where I will copy files from/to, except for this eSSD. My fastest SD cards are up to around 90MB/s and that's where I copy most data from.

Thanks very much, Makrom! Really appreciate you running the test.

Just curious, when you do video editing, do you keep your media files on the fusion drive or on an external drive?

 

[makrom]

Thanks very much, Makrom! Really appreciate you running the test.

Just curious, when you do video editing, do you keep your media files on the fusion drive or on an external drive?

On the T1, mainly for mobility though. This allows me to easily switch between my MBP and my iMac. I did some editing on the FD as well, it wasn't a problem so far. But this will definitely be an issue if you have several parallel 4k streams

 

[hfg]

[QUOTE="
how does fusion work when you have external drives...i am thinking of adding external drives for Media...such as movies and photos....so does that mean that all Photo and video files have to go direct onto the external HDD or do they automatically go on to the internal fusion...and you have to house clean from time to time to ensure the fusion doers not fill up...and move files internal to external??? (e.g. do you have iPhoto files bot hon internal and external..but it is always a manual move exercise??)

..also, would fusion drive be seen as 1 drive, and was to move content over??

Your Fusion drive appears as a single logical drive to the system and apps.

Anything you put on an external drive ... stays on the external drive ... it is totally separate from the Fusion drive. The Fusion drive only manages blocks of files that are on the drive members of the Fusion join ... although you can create Fusion drives with more than one hard disk joined with the SSD for more capacity.

 

[TrenttonY]

(didn't see this thread until I made my own, heres a copy)

Hi,

I'm debating if I should get a 4K iMac with a 2TB Fusion Drive or with a 256GB SSD and a External USB 3.0 5TB HDD?

1. The 4K iMac with a 2TB Fusion Drive will be $1639
2. The 4K iMac with a 256 SSD and a external USB 3.0 5TB HDD will be $1678

The 2TB Fusion Drive does come with a 128 GB SSD for the OS and frequently used applications. Which currently I have a rMBP with pure 256 SSD and out of that I only have used around 45GB so 128GB will be plenty.

With that being said, I plan on using this Mac as my everyday computer with internet browsing, very light gaming, so will I always experience pure SSD speeds as long I don't exceed the 128GB storage?

Heres will the 2TB HDD comes in...

I will also be using this iMac to hold media locally via iTunes.
Movies = it can hold 292 movies at around 7GB per movie
Music= it can hold a lot of music... at around 7MB per song

with all the media I want I will only have around 65 movies and 300 songs.

Yes, the 256GB SSD with a external 5TB Drive is a better deal, but I'm more of simplicity person, unfortunately the 21 inch iMac doesn't have a configuration of 3TB Fusion Drive (which I would get).

Q&A's

1. How does the Fushion Drive work?
2. How long do external HDD last? would 5TB be a over kill because it will probably die before I fill it up.
3. How long do the Hard Drive part of the Fusion Drive last? 5 Years?
4. Lets say I only use 50GB of SSD again, will my media fill out the rest of the 78 GB first then the HDD?
5. Will the HDD make noise? if so will that happen only when I access my iTunes media?
6. Is there a way to manually change the algorithms of what OS X puts on the SSD?

I have the Fusion w/ 24GB flash and haven't had any issues. This iMac is fast, and I hardly ever notice any slowdowns (really only when I'm in my Windows 7 VM is when I notice the spinning disk).

I am in Affinity Photo and other software daily, and I work with 23MP DNG RAW files.

I play some games, like SimCity 4 and Cities: Skylines. Nothing super advanced of course, but the AMD GPU (and i5 CPU) is plenty fast for these games and the filters/effects in Affinity Photo.

I also "only" have the stock 8GB of RAM, and rarely does my Mac have to resort to virtual memory (again, usually only when I'm in my Windows 7 VM). Within the next year or so I'll probably double to 16GB (for less than $50!), but that will likely last me until the iMac stops getting OS updates from Apple.

Moral of the story: buy what you want and need. Don't let other people spend your money for you.

What Mac do you have? I play those exact games and have been wondering how they preform, what settings?

 

[brofkand]

What Mac do you have? I play those exact games and have been wondering how they preform, what settings?

I have the Late 2015 iMac 5K (the one that costs $1999). It's a stock configuration.

Cities Skylines runs at 1080P (or maybe 1440p) with all settings on High. I haven't tested the FPS but it runs very well for me. I'm not the biggest fan of this game so I don't play it as much.

SimCity 4 runs at max resolution (1440p) and max settings. No issues at all; the new Aspyr Mac App Store update really gives the game new life. The bugs and crashes that have plagued this game almost since the initial Mac release are gone.

Both games run extremely well on this iMac, though you don't get the benefit of the Retina display with these games.

 

[TrenttonY]

I have the Late 2015 iMac 5K (the one that costs $1999). It's a stock configuration.

Cities Skylines runs at 1080P (or maybe 1440p) with all settings on High. I haven't tested the FPS but it runs very well for me. I'm not the biggest fan of this game so I don't play it as much.

SimCity 4 runs at max resolution (1440p) and max settings. No issues at all; the new Aspyr Mac App Store update really gives the game new life. The bugs and crashes that have plagued this game almost since the initial Mac release are gone.

Both games run extremely well on this iMac, though you don't get the benefit of the Retina display with these games.

Darn, dedicated graphics, I hope Iris Pro, can at least handle better than my rMBP Iris graphics.

 

[riviera74]

After reading all the comments in this thread I finally decided to get a 27 inch iMac with a 3tb fusion drive. My main use is Lightroom and PS, with a catalog that's currently 1.5 gigs and about 2 tb of raw images. A 1tb SSD would have added another $500 and I'd have to also purchase a RAID with at least 6tb of storage just to hold my files and provide backup, adding another $400-600. With the fusion drive configuration I'm saving on the initial cash outlay and I can keep using my current Lacie 3tb as a time machine backup.

I'm sure that SSDs are faster, but I'm not so certain that l/O is all that much a bottleneck for the work that I do. At least not important enough to drop another $1000 at this time.

It will arrive on Tuesday, so we'll see how it goes.

Since you have presumably had it for a week, how is your new iMac?

 

[daniel.hershman]

I got it late Tuesday night last week, I've been slowly moving all my photo files from usb external drives onto the 3 tb fusion drive. Overall it's incredibly fast, some slowdowns in Lightroom due to I/O but I'm chalking it up to the system 'learning' my files use patterns at this point. It's quiet, fast and the screen is amazing. I'm finding some issues in getting my NEC monitor to correctly calibrate as a secondary monitor in this setup, but I'm working on a solution.

 

[kazmac]

As I was backed into a corner financially, I narrowed it down to two choices with this non retina 21.5", 256 ssd or 2TB fusion. I wasn't ready to risk only having 256 ssd on this machine, so I opted for 2TB fusion. Yes, the fusion or spinner drives on the display models at the Apple stores are tortoise slow, but I don't think I'll be doing anything ridiculously demanding now that my university design work has been nixed.

 

[twilexia]

As I was backed into a corner financially, I narrowed it down to two choices with this non retina 21.5", 256 ssd or 2TB fusion. I wasn't ready to risk only having 256 ssd on this machine, so I opted for 2TB fusion. Yes, the fusion or spinner drives on the display models at the Apple stores are tortoise slow, but I don't think I'll be doing anything ridiculously demanding now that my university design work has been nixed.

Honestly I think for anyone who doesn't do media work the fusion drive is better than the 256gb configuration. For video/audio editing the SSD is far superior to the fusion

 

[maflynn]

Honestly I think for anyone who doesn't do media work the fusion drive is better than the 256gb configuration. For video/audio editing the SSD is far superior to the fusion

SSD is superior, in speed, but for raw storage/price the Fusion drive does make sense. I'd need to purchase the 1TB flash drive and at nearly a thousand dollars (between 700 and 900 depending on the iMac model), its an upgrade that I couldn't justify.

 

[apfelmann]

Spinning hard drives inside computers are an artefact of the past! Except you have two slots: 1 for SSD, 1 for HDD (if you wish). otherwise: SSD is a must! FD or HDD is completely useless! just get a fast external HDD!

 

[twilexia]

Spinning hard drives inside computers are an artefact of the past! Except you have two slots: 1 for SSD, 1 for HDD (if you wish). otherwise: SSD is a must! FD or HDD is completely useless! just get a fast external HDD!

You're not saying anything new here. People have heard this millions of times and it's not going to change anyone's minds. Saying spinners are old or rusty or outdated or bulky is a matter of taste/style, and it hardly matters when it's inside of your computer and you can't see it.

SSD is superior, in speed, but for raw storage/price the Fusion drive does make sense. I'd need to purchase the 1TB flash drive and at nearly a thousand dollars (between 700 and 900 depending on the iMac model), its an upgrade that I couldn't justify.

1TB Flash is a bit of a premium I agree, basically one is paying the price of a lower end laptop. Personally I think it's worth it if you're using the iMac to make money. But 512GB SSD is the best compromise, you still have space for all your working files and applications, and you can backup to a larger drive externally. the 2tb/3tb fusion should only be used by consumers who don't plan on doing any media work, as in video and audio editing one will immediately see benefits of having a pure SSD driving the entire setup.

 

[bent christian]

FD or HDD is completely useless!

Nope.

It sounds like you have never used a Fusion drive for any significant length of time. 325 MB/s, rough overall average in the mid 200's, is completely "useable" for almost anyone. I work professionally in the graphic arts, and my Fusion iMac is actually faster than the one I use at work.

 

[fandangoguy]

quick question for video editors...if I intend to use lacie external drives for all video footage...how much difference in real life does it make to have an internal flash drive vs 2 TB fusion? I think anything will be faster than the "old" 7200 I have in my vintage 2009 imac...