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Fusion Drive--love it or regret it--please share!
- Thread starter Susansmac
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So far I am very happy with a 3TB on a 27" iMac. I had considered the 1TB SSD, however the cost was pretty substantial, and I also needed more than 1TB of space. Due to this, I thought the 3TB option would be the best choice. Although I have only had the machine for about a week, I have been very happy so far with it.
Love it, however, if I had the option available to me at the time I would have gone with the 256GB SSD for the same price.
If you need lots of storage, it's going to work well, but for me I'm only using the storage for what I need and just using external storage for other things.
If you need lots of storage, it's going to work well, but for me I'm only using the storage for what I need and just using external storage for other things.
I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in 6 months.
I suspect within a year or so all traditional hard drives will have been removed from apple products. They are far and away the most unreliable component in a PC.
Yeah I really hope SSD's are common place when I get my next iMac or at least are an affordable option. But in the meantime, the Fusion Drive is a really good alternative.
Like mentionned earlier, Fusion Drive dynamically "moves" data based on your usage. Basically all your OS and most of your apps will always be on the SSD, and the files you use most.
One thing I want to add, is that Fusion Drive always leave a 4GB "clear" on the SSD for new files. So for example, if you have 500GB on your 1TB Fusion Drive, and you download a new file, it will download and you will read it on the SSD. However with time OS X will "judge" if this file remain on the SSD or if it will be moved to the HDD based on your usage.
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Personally I am using a 1TB Fusion drive (since october) and honestly it work like a charm. I see a very clear speed bump compared to a regular HDD in day to day work (booting, opening apps and everything I use a lot), I almost never "feel" any slowdown from the Hard drive.
It doesn't matter how fast the disk is unless it produces noticeably faster real-world performance. The goal isn't to win the "Benchmark Olympics".
In the above case your SSD was roughly equal in read performance to my FD, and the write performance about 2x. Here's the problem: on most systems reads outnumber writes by 10 to 1 or more. I invite anyone who doubts this to start Activity Monitor and compare global reads vs writes at the bottom of the screen. So in this case, SSD write performance is much better than FD but:
(1) FD write performance is not slow
(2) Overall what counts is read performance
Improving something you infrequently need doesn't help real-world practicality. If there is a cost to that improvement (money or diminished storage space), you've traded a real-world improvement for one which may not produce dramatic differences.
Most apps have a mix of bottlenecks. Last night I imported 70 GB of video material into FCP X. The average I/O rate was about 50-100 megabytes/sec, and that was from my 8TB Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt RAID array. An *infinitely* fast SSD would not have been much faster, because the import process was limited by multi-threaded CPU factors.
The important disk performance metric is *not* I/O rate on a benchmark, it's disk queue length on your real-world workload. If the disk queue (e.g, number of pending I/O operations) is not excessive, then making the disk faster won't help.
Disk queue length can be monitored using the Dtrace facility from terminal, e.g, "sudo iopending". More info: http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scripts-for-mac-os-x/
If I was getting an iMac today I'd probably get a SSD but not because it would transform system performance. It would be a little faster in certain real-world situations. If prospective iMac purchasers can afford the SSD size which fulfills their current and future data storage needs, then by all means get it. But if a limited budget causes them to scrimp on SSD size and then purchase slow external hard drives to move data around, they may regret the SSD.
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I went with the 3TB fusion drive in my iMac and have been very happy. While I know a pure SDD would be even faster, the fusion drive more than meets my needs.
No - the most important reason for getting an SSD is so that you have some really cool benchmarks to screenshot and post at every opportunity
No - the most important reason for getting an SSD is so that you have some really cool benchmarks to screenshot and post at every opportunity
Seen that screenshot in about 6 different threads
I love it. I don't regret it. Much more affordable than the SSD, and much better performance than the HDD.
So how much do these SDD bench marks really play out in day-to-day use. Are we talking about a 2 second difference between the SDD and Fusion?
When I read reviews about SDD, it feels like I would be a fool to get a fusion because, fusion performance won't last, the speed slows down over time, or it's a temporary solution while Apple waits for the price of SDD to come down, so fusion won't stick around, or that SDD blows fusion out of the water performance wise. Yet for those that have the fusion, they seem pretty happy with it. It's hard for me to determine what is the best move. Being that I will be getting an Apple discount (15%), should I not pass up the 1 TB SDD? Or would that money be better spent elsewhere?
Arrrrggggg I can't decide!
When I read reviews about SDD, it feels like I would be a fool to get a fusion because, fusion performance won't last, the speed slows down over time, or it's a temporary solution while Apple waits for the price of SDD to come down, so fusion won't stick around, or that SDD blows fusion out of the water performance wise. Yet for those that have the fusion, they seem pretty happy with it. It's hard for me to determine what is the best move. Being that I will be getting an Apple discount (15%), should I not pass up the 1 TB SDD? Or would that money be better spent elsewhere?
Arrrrggggg I can't decide!
I can't make up your mind for you, but I really don't regret getting Fusion over SSD. Everything is snappy and programs load almost instantly. My 2012 iMac is still much faster than 2010 MBP with Samsung Evo SSD.
Do not take BlackMagic results too seriously. It's meant to benchmark video editing capabilities, which in most cases involve one large block of video file. In reality, programs will have bunch of small files. Fusion's smaller 120GB will be slower when dealing with smaller random accesses, than larger SSDs. If you want the speed, go with at least 250GB of SSD since the big jump seems to be from 120 to 250, and go up in capacity depending on how much SSD space you need. I find that most people will be fine with 250 or 500 for the most part. There are no real benefit of having your media or documents on SSD. Buy SSD option that will be large enough for your applications and maybe scratch space and use HDD for the rest.
I am in the same boat as you. I'm just about to order a fully loaded 27" with i7, 780M and upgrading the RAM myself to 16GB but I keep flip flopping between 256GB SSD and 1TB fusion drive. I will be using the iMac for a bit of development and also installing windows 8 for a bit of gaming. I can't really afford 512GB SSD and I really want the i7 and 780M. At the moment I am leaning toward the fusion drive and keep the machine 2 years then sell it with a years Apple care left on it. Then I hope the next iMac will be SSD only so I don't have to decide again.
No - the most important reason for getting an SSD is so that you have some really cool benchmarks to screenshot and post at every opportunity
Seen that screenshot in about 6 different threads
I was going to suggest that certain users put screenshots in their signatures for time-saving and convenience.
Anyway, I think the FD is a fantastic innovation and bought my CTO iMac with the 1TB. I've since added a Thunderbolt SSD, split it in two partitions, boot from it and use the other half for BootCamp but it wasn't because of any limitations of the Fusion Drive.
In reality, I see absolutely zero difference in boot speeds, app launches, or general usage between when I was booting to the Fusion Drive and the SSD.
There's no reason why the 1TB Fusion Drive shouldn't come standard on all iMacs in 2014. The 128GB SSD partition is not costing Apple much and they can greatly enhance the consumer experience for iMac buyers who may not be privy to the benefits of an SSD vs an HDD.
Then allow 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB SSD BTO options.
Then allow 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB SSD BTO options.
I was told by what I think are reliable MR members that Black Magic is useless for benchmarking my DIY fusion drive. It was excellent news for me as I had been fretting for months over my really really low Black Magic R/W times. Maybe the below is a way to test fusion performance?
As I've said earlier in this thread, I regret Fusion.
I installed (and booted from) a Lacie 1TB Thunderbolt SSD today and now the speeds are phenomenal!
For details and before/after benchmarks see
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=18842266#post18842266
I installed (and booted from) a Lacie 1TB Thunderbolt SSD today and now the speeds are phenomenal!
For details and before/after benchmarks see
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=18842266#post18842266
I read the other thread and your benchmark results. Was your Fusion Drive almost completely filled with data? Was it only the bad test results that had you concerned, or was that actually reflected in its performance?
If your Fusion Drive wasn't completely full (or nearly so) then maybe there is a hardware issue because I have a 7200rpm external HD in a USB3 cradle that gets better write speeds on Blackmagic.
As mentioned, I am also booting to an external Thunderbolt SSD now, but I have to be honest that I really haven't noticed an actual difference in performance one way or the other.
I think people sometimes get way too hung up with chasing benchmark numbers.
By the way, those scores you posted with the Lacie RAID drive to the other thread are almost exactly what I get with the Fusion Drive on this machine.
Fair enough. If it was slowing you down I definitely get it.
Personally, I wanted to have more than the 128GB of flash even though I wasn't feeling any negative effects when I moved over to the external SSD. I also wanted to be able to put BootCamp on SSD as well. Call it future-proofing.
I like the fact that I can deal with any potential failures now by simply swapping out the SSD as well.
But once the AppleCare runs out on this machine in 3 years I will open it up and swap out the 128GB for a 1TB PCIe blade SSD. By then, one can hope they'll be a lot cheaper and more readily available.
I just bought the 27" iMac with 3TB FD and I have to say its great.
BUT:
I had a late 2011 27" iMac with 256GB SSD and 3TB HDD and I loved the option of turning off the HHD. I had the OS and programs on my SSD and all media files on the HDD. In "Finder" I could simply eject the HDD and my Mac was SILENT. I also liked the fact that all my personal files were "offline" while surfing the web.
BUT:
I had a late 2011 27" iMac with 256GB SSD and 3TB HDD and I loved the option of turning off the HHD. I had the OS and programs on my SSD and all media files on the HDD. In "Finder" I could simply eject the HDD and my Mac was SILENT. I also liked the fact that all my personal files were "offline" while surfing the web.