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A little help please

P

Pinkly Smooth

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 8, 2018
166
9
Hi everybody.
So, I own an iMac and I have some doubts about a certain issue. The specifics of my iMac are:
the retina,5k, 27 inch, 2017.
macOS High Sierra Version 10.13.6
3.8ghz, intel core i5
8gb memory.
I have 128gb SSD fusion drive. I have doubts that the SSD may be full. Is it possible that the SSD could be full? How do you check that? Is there a way where you can check the power of the iMac, to see if has been reduced in any way? Is it possible that the SSD could be full? How do you check that? Is there a way where you can check the power of the iMac, to see if has been reduced in any way? I was advised to run apple diagnostics to reveal if the iMac has lost any of its power. I did that and it said 'no issues found.' Does that mean that the fusion drive is not full and my iMac is fully functioning and has not lost any of its power? If my iMac had issues with the fusion drive and it was running out, and slowing down the iMac, would it show up on the apple diagnostics? Thank you.
 
Click the Apple in the top left of your screen.
Click "About this Mac"
Click the tab for storage and you will get a view of your drives storage.

This should easily show you if your drive is full or not.
 
Don't you mean a 1tb fusion drive?
If I'm not mistaken, isn't the SSD portion of the fusion drive on the 2017 iMac around 32gb?
 
I don't know. I was talking about the fusion drive, not the actual storage of the Mac. If the SSD, in the fusion drive is full, it makes the Mac slower, if I'm not mistaken. I am trying to find a way to see if whether the SSD fusion drive was full or not.
 
macOS dynamically adjusts the contents of the SSD portion of your Fusion Drive based on a set of algorithms determining which files you access more frequently and which ones are safe to outsource to the slower hard drive. In addition, it keeps a couple of gigabytes empty that can be used for writes thereby giving a much faster subjective appearance. Accordingly, the SSD is always "full", as in filled with frequently used files, but can never really get full, as on cannot write to any longer. A half-empty SSD in a Fusion Drive would be as pointless as empty RAM.

Long story short: there's nothing you can do or should do, and as far as I'm aware there's also no way to check capacity on a single component of a Fusion Drive.
 
The 1TB Fusion Drive has a 32GB SSD. The 2TB and 3TB Fusion Drives have 128GB SSDs.

As mj_ notes, the purpose of a Fusion Drive is to load the SSD with the most-often-accessed files and it will do it's best to maximize the number of files it can put on the SSD. Where you will see a Fusion Drive "slow down" is when the iMac has to access data off the HDD portion or when it is swapping data between the SSD and HDD and is accessing the HDD.
 
CWallace said:
The 1TB Fusion Drive has a 32GB SSD. The 2TB and 3TB Fusion Drives have 128GB SSDs.

As mj_ notes, the purpose of a Fusion Drive is to load the SSD with the most-often-accessed files and it will do it's best to maximize the number of files it can put on the SSD. Where you will see a Fusion Drive "slow down" is when the iMac has to access data off the HDD portion or when it is swapping data between the SSD and HDD and is accessing the HDD.
Click to expand...
Hi, but how do you realise is the fusion drive slows down or when the SSD is full?
If you run apple diagnostics, will it reveal this?
 
Pinkly Smooth said:
Hi, but how do you realise is the fusion drive slows down or when the SSD is full? If you run apple diagnostics, will it reveal this?
Click to expand...

The SDD is always meant to be full as it is the fastest storage. When the SSD has to copy data to or from the HDD, then the overall system performance will drop because the HDD is so much slower than the SSD so the SSD is effectively "waiting" for the HDD. But the OS does it's best to minimize when this happens and keep the SSD full of the files/programs you use most-often to keep the speed as fast as possible.

All Apple Diagnostics will tell you is if there is a physical problem with the SSD or the HDD.
 
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