Why the Hate for Fusion Drives?

[jazzer15]

This thread has been interesting reading. I'm on the verge of buying a 21.5" iMac, and I was weighing my decision between a 256GB SSD and a 1TB Fusion, even taking into account that the 1TB Fusion has just 24GB SSD. I'm a light user; rarely anything more advanced than hobbyist-photo stuff. The occasional iMovie (like, once every year or two). I was told as a general idea that a 1TB Fusion would be 2-4 times as fast as the regular 1TB HDD, while the pure SSD would be about 8 times as fast, and it was a matter of how much money I wanted to spend.

I spoke to two different Apple store reps (at the online Apple store) when I started doing research and finding out what options were available. Both told me to get a Fusion drive because it would be faster than an SSD. I decided after that experience to talk to people who actually might know something. (FWIW, I have had some very good experiences with some Apple sales associates also, but it can be a bit hit and miss.

 

[lkalliance]

I spoke to two different Apple store reps (at the online Apple store) when I started doing research and finding out what options were available. Both told me to get a Fusion drive because it would be faster than an SSD. I decided after that experience to talk to people who actually might know something. (FWIW, I have had some very good experiences with some Apple sales associates also, but it can be a bit hit and miss.

Definitely hit or miss...but then what isn't, really? Actually this conversation was from a third-party dealer. Not sure if that makes any difference.

 

[bent christian]

I was told as a general idea that a 1TB Fusion would be 2-4 times as fast as the regular 1TB HDD, while the pure SSD would be about 8 times as fast, and it was a matter of how much money I wanted to spend.

This is mostly correct. The current Fusion drives will be about as fast as what Apple was doing with SSD in 2013. My wife's 13" MBP is slightly faster (400MB/s write) than our 1TB Fusion drive at its peak (325MB/s write). There is not much of a difference in feel between the two in general use.

 

[jazzer15]

Might I suggest using a internal SSD (big enough for OS X and Windows if desired) with a portable Seagate External "Fast" RAID-0 hard disk (USB powered) which can be velcro'd to the back of the iMac stand out of sight. It is quite fast, and the 4TB model would allow a bootable clone of your SSD plus plenty of space for photo, music, video libraries. Then perhaps a larger 3.5" USB3 backup disk (6TB) behind or under your desk for Time Machine backups. Neat and clean for normal "everyday" computer usage.

Thanks. I started a thread a little while back about backup options. That thread is here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/backup-devices-and-desktop-organization.1939642/ Rather than derail the topic of this thread, would you mind checking out my further questions to you there?

 

[NewtonPippin]

I read this thread from the first post to the last... I hate to say it, but the people who are defending the Fusion drive sound like they're trying to justify the fact that they skimped out on getting a top of the line machine. You can try to argue you dont notice a difference, its better for your needs, etc etc but I suspect you wouldn't be on this forum desperately defending your choice if deep down you didn't know you made a big mistake.

Buying a machine for the price that Apple charges, in the year 2015, with a spinning hdd..... yikes.

 

[lkalliance]

I read this thread from the first post to the last... I hate to say it, but the people who are defending the Fusion drive sound like they're trying to justify the fact that they skimped out on getting a top of the line machine. You can try to argue you dont notice a difference, its better for your needs, etc etc but I suspect you wouldn't be on this forum desperately defending your choice if deep down you didn't know you made a big mistake.

Buying a machine for the price that Apple charges, in the year 2015, with a spinning hdd..... yikes.

The same argument could theoretically be reversed and applied the opposite way:

I hate to say it, but the people who are criticizing the Fusion drive sound like they're trying to justify the fact that they paid extra money for something not significantly better than a middle-tier machine. You can try to argue you notice a difference, it's better for your needs, etc etc but I suspect you wouldn't be on this forum desperately defending your choice if deep down you didn't know you made a big mistake.

Buying an upgrade for the price that Apple charges, in the year 2015, for something that doesn't perform that much better than a spinning hdd...... yikes.

 

[bent christian]

Buying a machine for the price that Apple charges, in the year 2015, with a spinning hdd..... yikes.

Literally, any product you buy from Apple is overpriced. Every single one. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows they are overpaying. It's just matter of degrees.

The more one spends on an Apple product, the more they are losing out. Absolutely.

I needed an all-in-one that would fit a certain (small) space and came in at a certain price point. I needed a quad-core. I needed a screen I could rely on. The iMac I bought fit all of those requirements. I think it's really the only machine that could have fit. It's a system that maybe should have been a couple of hundred dollars cheaper, but that was a concession I made given the restraints. Special needs often come with a premium price. Not a huge deal for a machine I will use in some capacity until it dies. I bought what I needed, not what I wanted.

You spent $3k on a machine and it's not making you any money?? YIKES!!

 

[fandangoguy]

Hi Joema2- I re-evaluated my budget and decided to go for a used imac late 2013 with i7, 32GB RAM, 4 GB video card and 3TB FD...a bargain...under $1700US! I feel confident it will be a great improvement over my beloved imac 2009 which now will become my second monitor to my "new" imac. I tried my firewire drives with the thunderbolt adaptor and they work perfectly. The FD feels fast and responsive- really nice-a late 2015 might have been faster but it was too much for me.
Maybe for my next upgrade I will go all the way. The imac came with Maverick 10.9.5 installed and i have decided not to upgrade for now-I installed \FCP 7 and it works perfectly-\i also have Adobr \CS6-
I think the FD is a great choice if all editing is done externally. \i will get a thunderbolt raid in a year or so.
thanks for all the opinions
e

 

[-BigMac-]

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.

I have the 2TB Fusion with 128 ssd.
There is times i notice a slowdown which is definitely the hdd related, but it is not a big enough deal to really warrant the huge price bump needed to get a 1TB SSD. Not at the moment, anyway. It is something i am thinking about doing down the track though, definitely.

 

[maflynn]

There is times i notice a slowdown which is definitely the hdd related,

So far, the only times I've noticed a performance hit is when I use Lightroom, I assume my images are on the HD portion, but then applying filters, or other work is not always the fastest anyways so I think some of the performance (or lack there of) is being masked by my expectation that it won't be fast anyways - if that makes sense.

 

[DoNoHarm]

I feel like this thread should have ended with a "mic drop" with this post. Interesting to see how the discussion kind of just continued without reference to it again. You can't beat a real world comparison.

I do have a follow up question to anyone who know the answer: Can't you just replace the SSD on the motherboard AND the spinning HD? Perhaps this is a way to get a "fusion drive" with the 256gb ssd part and a 3tb hd part that people are seeking?

The simple answer is no, a 2 or 3TB FD will not become excessively slow in those scenarios. I have a 2013 iMac 27 with 3TB FD and a 2015 iMac 27 with 1TB SSD on the same desk, right beside each other. I use both for video and photo editing.

If you are copying huge volumes of files to/from the FD it will not maintain the SSD rate but it's not slow. Also importing, exporting and editing raw photos and H264 video is not nearly as I/O intensive as most people think. Anybody who doubts this can watch it themselves using Activity Monitor or iStat Menus. Those are more CPU-bound operations due to the encode/decode required. You will typically high activity on all CPU cores and moderate disk I/O rates. Low-compression video or multicam editing can entail more I/O but those quickly exceed the capacity of most iMac SSDs.

To further clarify, my 1TB iMac can do folder-to-folder file copies at over 500MB/sec -- that means 500MB/sec read *and* 500MB write, or a total I/O rate of over 1,000MB/sec. By contrast my 2013 iMac with 3TB FD can only do about 130 MB/sec -- that means about 130MB/sec read *and* 130MB/sec write or a total I/O rate of about 260MB/sec. If the disk was more full the I/O rate would be even less. You might think the FD iMac would be much slower at editing video, photos, etc.

However -- file copying is not like normal production work editing video or photos. It is moving bulk data from one place to another. That is typically an infrequent utility task that has little CPU and is all I/O. By contrast 1080p H264 video and still editing is largely but not totally CPU-oriented and the I/O rate is usually modest. In most real-world tasks Fusion Drive does pretty well. Both FCP X and Lightroom start up in about the same time on my SSD iMac as my Fusion Drive iMac.

You can definitely find cases where SSD is faster in real world scenario (vs a benchmark) but they are not as common as you'd think. Some of those involve doing things that wouldn't fit on an internal SSD anyway -- say copying 500GB from one folder to the next.

 

[maflynn]

I do have a follow up question to anyone who know the answer: Can't you just replace the SSD on the motherboard AND the spinning HD? Perhaps this is a way to get a "fusion drive" with the 256gb ssd part and a 3tb hd part that people are seeking?

Technically you can, but there's two issues, first the iMac is virtually sealed, so most people are unwilling to void their warranty. Secondly is parts availability, specifically the flash portion of the Fusion drive. You can only buy them from parts pull on eBay. They're not sold anywhere.

 

[DoNoHarm]

Technically you can, but there's two issues, first the iMac is virtually sealed, so most people are unwilling to void their warranty. Secondly is parts availability, specifically the flash portion of the Fusion drive. You can only buy them from parts pull on eBay. They're not sold anywhere.

What models would you find a 256gb ssd that is compatible with the fusion drive on? To my knowledge, none of the fusion drives have 256gb ssd's.

 

[varian55zx]

I read this thread from the first post to the last... I hate to say it, but the people who are defending the Fusion drive sound like they're trying to justify the fact that they skimped out on getting a top of the line machine. You can try to argue you dont notice a difference, its better for your needs, etc etc but I suspect you wouldn't be on this forum desperately defending your choice if deep down you didn't know you made a big mistake.

Buying a machine for the price that Apple charges, in the year 2015, with a spinning hdd..... yikes.

You just fail to state that you completely rely on those spinning HDDs to store all your data... but they're outside of your computer. The argument from the SSD proponents is, "**** spinners, I'll go with pure SSD in my Mac. Oh what do I do with my hundreds and hundreds of gigs of my data, well store it on one of my many external spinning hard drives I have sticking out of my computer of course, what else?"

Hell, if I didn't already purchase the great and adequate 2 tb fusion drive in my new iMac I would've just gone for the pure internal spinner option and fitted an external SSD for the OS and apps.... honestly. You have a whole hell of a lot less 'data' in external nowheresville (time machine backups notwithstanding), and I happen to be someone that just prefers to keep the actual stuff on the computer. I want to limit externals as much as I can, for various reasons, which are probably fairly apparent, and they will die. I just had a crappy Seagate 1.5 tb external HDD that died after about a year of owning it, that said some of the internal HDDs on my classic Macs, like my 2008 MacBook Pro, that isn't even used anymore, still work. But much more of my very valuable data would be on externals using the setups I see touted on this board, and those are more volatile. The fusion drive is a great compromise for space and speed, and the pricing is appropriate.

 

[maflynn]

What models would you find a 256gb ssd that is compatible with the fusion drive on? To my knowledge, none of the fusion drives have 256gb ssd's.

You just need a 256GB blade SSD that came from a late model (ones that use PCIe SSDs) MBP. I think you may need PCIe 2.0 4-Lane SSD which may be harder to find on eBay. Some can correct me on what's being used on the iMac.

 

[NewtonPippin]

You just fail to state that you completely rely on those spinning HDDs to store all your data... but they're outside of your computer. The argument from the SSD proponents is, "**** spinners, I'll go with pure SSD in my Mac. Oh what do I do with my hundreds and hundreds of gigs of my data, well store it on one of my many external spinning hard drives I have sticking out of my computer of course, what else?"

Hell, if I didn't already purchase the great and adequate 2 tb fusion drive in my new iMac I would've just gone for the pure internal spinner option and fitted an external SSD for the OS and apps.... honestly. You have a whole hell of a lot less 'data' in external nowheresville (time machine backups notwithstanding), and I happen to be someone that just prefers to keep the actual stuff on the computer. I want to limit externals as much as I can, for various reasons, which are probably fairly apparent, and they will die. I just had a crappy Seagate 1.5 tb external HDD that died after about a year of owning it, that said some of the internal HDDs on my classic Macs, like my 2008 MacBook Pro, that isn't even used anymore, still work. But much more of my very valuable data would be on externals using the setups I see touted on this board, and those are more volatile. The fusion drive is a great compromise for space and speed, and the pricing is appropriate.

I mean, that's your choice to spend over 2k on a slow nonupgradable spinning hard drive in the year 2016.

 

[varian55zx]

I mean, that's your choice to spend over 2k on a slow nonupgradable spinning hard drive in the year 2016.

I understand that argument, but Look. Either way you're gonna be using an HDD, the reality is that SSDs aren't practical cost wise for storing large amounts of files. The question would be would you rather have it in or out of your computer... and again I went for the Fusion, partly to even circumvent this problem. But I think booting off an external SSD is viable. And I definitely think a fusion drive is a solid choice. The sad reality is that SSD technology is still a premium technology, and as such, is only offered in small storage options that for some people are far too small to be that useful at all, despite the amazing speed.

 

[Strider64]

I find it funny that people today are now arguing over the speed of hard drives rather than the capacity they can hold. I remember when hard drives were first coming out on the market and their sizes 10 megabytes or 20 megabytes. An if my memory is correct some of them were scsi (I think we used to refer to them as scuzzy drives) and expensive compared today's hard drives. I might be an old fart, but my latest computer the hard drive is fast enough for me and when I first turn on the computer I'm not going gung ho right off the bat. I think years from now people will be laughing at us for they will be either using no hard drives with everything being stored/run on the cloud or storage being totally solid state with a low cost that it is an after thought. I'm sure there will be some other technology that they will be harping about. Maybe like how their computer didn't make their coffee hot enough (joking).

 

[varian55zx]

I think years from now people will be laughing at us for they will be either using no hard drives with everything being stored/run on the cloud or storage being totally solid state with a low cost that it is an after thought.

Honestly, I think HDDs are already horribly outdated. The disgusting, spinning technology is just terrible. And prone to breakage. To me, SSDs are the current technology for storage now, and should no longer be considered a premium item, but these companies want to keep it premium as long as possible so they can cash in on it as much as possible.

The reality is the HDD is an outdated technology, that in my opinion should've already been replaced by superior SSDs. But sadly, the process is being slowed as much as possible by these different companies.

That said, I am very happy with my 2 tb fusion. And the 7200 rpm is much more livable than the disgrace that is the 5400 rpm drive coming standard on some of the Macs, including the 4k machine. Apple, what are you going for with that?

 

[svendobbelaere]

I switched from a 2013 Retina MacBook pro with a 256 GB SSD drive to a 5K iMac with 2 TB Fusion drive.

I opted for the 2TB fusion drive because that was a stock configuration. The BTO SSD was just too expensive IMHO, on an already expensive computer (and I would've wanted at least a 2 TB SSD anyway).

It's a bit slower than pure SSD, but ok.

Preferably, I'd go pure SSD instead of fusion, but both my RMBPro and the iMac don't really allow upgrades. I've upgraded my wife's mini to dual SSD (2 TB Samsung and 960 GB Sandisk).

Life is about choices; I got tired of having to move files to and from external drives on the MacBook Pro.

 

[maflynn]

Life is about choices; I got tired of having to move files to and from external drives on the MacBook Pro.

Indeed, I wished I could have purchased the 1TB SSD, but that was just too pricey. I do like the idea of having all my data on the internal drive. I also grew tired of dealing with an external drive.

 

[bent christian]

Honestly, I think HDDs are already horribly outdated. The disgusting, spinning technology is just terrible. And prone to breakage.

I am not sure what you are ding to your hard drives. Spinning drives are still viable technology. Statically, they are not much more prone to breakdown than most other major components in a computer system (PSU, CPU, Mobo). Anecdotally, the only drive I have ever had fail on me dropped from a bed to a concrete floor and probably was smashed internally. I am at work now, surround by ancient drives. IDE drives that have run 24/7 for years, most likely over ten years given the connector, without issue. Hard drives that are eight and nine years old are still in use at home.

 

[Adam552]

What annoyed me was that the SSD in the new fusion drive is very small. Main reason was I'd like to bootcamp on the SSD as well. But looks like I'm going to USB 3 SSD with bootcamp instead and get a fusion drive.

 

[bent christian]

What annoyed me was that the SSD in the new fusion drive is very small. Main reason was I'd like to bootcamp on the SSD as well. But looks like I'm going to USB 3 SSD with bootcamp instead and get a fusion drive.

I got the 1TB Fusion drive model in 2015. Recently, I have been booting from an external 256GB SSD. I get the benefit of the OS and applications being on the SSD, ~400MB/sec write speeds consistently, and a very fast 1TB storage drive with a 4GB cache and 20GB SSD front end. The cache is really never filled up for what I use it for. That means 290MB/sec write speeds for storage.

 

[Adam552]

I got the 1TB Fusion drive model in 2015. Recently, I have been booting from an external 256GB SSD. I get the benefit of the OS and applications being on the SSD, ~400MB/sec write speeds consistently, and a very fast 1TB storage drive with a 4GB cache and 20GB SSD front end. The cache is really never filled up for what I use it for. That means 290MB/sec write speeds for storage.

Sounds pretty nice to be honest, I'll probably do something similar when I upgrade my Late 2012 model this year.