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fusion drive longevity
- Thread starter padams35
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HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Volume of use- particularly writes to the SSD portion- would drive longevity. One minimally used might still fire up in 2035.
As you can see from many threads here and all over the place, many have been conking last few years. It's not age- but use- that is mostly the driver of "when?"
Meanwhile in pitches to buy Silicon with too little RAM, all that SWAP is basically writing to the SSD like it is spare RAM. Many spin how it should be nothing to worry about for life of Mac (and that may or may not prove true)... like many spun how fusion SSD writes should be nothing to worry about for life of Mac. Caveat Emptor*
*AKA: up the RAM if you need more vs. trusting fan opinions that SWAP is no issue. Exactly as it was with Fusion, they won't be there to offer any warranty service on such claims when SWAP wears out Silicon SSDs. Instead, the advice will be almost the same: buy a new Mac. At least with fusion, one could replace just the drive... and at market rates for SSDs instead of 3X-5X market.
As you can see from many threads here and all over the place, many have been conking last few years. It's not age- but use- that is mostly the driver of "when?"
Meanwhile in pitches to buy Silicon with too little RAM, all that SWAP is basically writing to the SSD like it is spare RAM. Many spin how it should be nothing to worry about for life of Mac (and that may or may not prove true)... like many spun how fusion SSD writes should be nothing to worry about for life of Mac. Caveat Emptor*
*AKA: up the RAM if you need more vs. trusting fan opinions that SWAP is no issue. Exactly as it was with Fusion, they won't be there to offer any warranty service on such claims when SWAP wears out Silicon SSDs. Instead, the advice will be almost the same: buy a new Mac. At least with fusion, one could replace just the drive... and at market rates for SSDs instead of 3X-5X market.
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I have a 2014 i5 2.8ghz/8gb Mini with a 1tb Fusion drive. It was exclusively a media server and I actually split the 128gb ssd from the 1tb hard drive and used the ssd for the system (all my media was on an external SSD). I didn't use the hard drive portion of that disk at all, but (apparently) the HD bearing started to fail after around 4 years of just spinning 24/7. Not 100% sure what the problem was, didn't open it up but sound did not appear to be coming from the fan and was similar to other failing hard drives I've had.
[edit] Sorry, didn't notice you're talking about an iMac, but I assume the fusion drives were comparable?
[edit] Sorry, didn't notice you're talking about an iMac, but I assume the fusion drives were comparable?
Mac mini fusion drive results welcome! Just posting in the iMac community since I'm guessing there is a greater volume of users.
Sure it takes 30 minutes after starting to be really usable but my 2017 27" only gets shut down when updating or if there is a power cut. Otherwise it performs okay - not great but it does what I ask eventually. I have an M3 MacBook Air for work but I still can't get past this beautiful 5k screen so I will use this iMac as long as I can.
My late-2014 Mac mini with Fusion Drive hasn’t been hammered over the years, which is probably why it worked fine when I fired it up recently to see if it’d run an LLM. It’s not my main machine, but it was for a time. I’d guess it’s only been used in earnest for about half of its life so far, but that’s only a guess.
I have a 2017 27-inch iMac and I had the original 1 TB Fusion Drive until mid-2024. I decided to "de-fuse" the two volumes and replace the 32 GB SSD with a 1 TB SSD, and keep the 1 TB hard drive as internal storage. Performance was always great with the Fusion Drive.