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Fusion Drive vs SSD
- Thread starter Rob.G
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From my experience over the past two weeks or so, the Fusion drive works. But, a pure SSD would, to me, work better. Even my test via an external enclosed SSD, seems to do well via the Blackmagic Hard Drive app test.
I'd be careful, the SSD in the fusion drive runs circles around nearly every one of those SSDs you'll find on Amazon.
It's merely the 128gb version of the same line of SSDs used in iMacs.
It is a faster SSD, but as you noted, its only 128GB (for Fusion drives 2TB and up). The downside is most people's data exceeds that of 128GB, so a USB 3.0 or TB external drive with an SSD may give better overall performance.
I'm not there yet, I have over 500GB filled up on my Fusion drive, but even so, what I use most often is on the fast flash storage and I'm content with what I have
I'm going to have to opt for the 2TB Fusion Drive. After spending close to $2k, might as well get something that will 'last a while'. Apple haven't made this whole spec configuration easy.
One should be able to have a decent sized PCIe SSD installed, at a decent price.
One should be able to have a decent sized PCIe SSD installed, at a decent price.
It is a faster SSD, but as you noted, its only 128GB (for Fusion drives 2TB and up). The downside is most people's data exceeds that of 128GB, so a USB 3.0 or TB external drive with an SSD may give better overall performance.
I'm not there yet, I have over 500GB filled up on my Fusion drive, but even so, what I use most often is on the fast flash storage and I'm content with what I have
This is the boat I will be in so I am glad to hear this drive works well for others.
I agree, in this day and age, its silly to have to rely on a spinning hard drive. While I have stated that I'm content with my Fusion drive, in an ideal world, I could have easily selected an SSD that was not exorbitantly priced. The Fusion drive is the best option when you consider performance, data storage and price.
Off to Apple to trade up to a 2TB Fusion Drive. Slight delay; I performed an erase of my drive earlier, to perform a reinstall of the OS (restore to factory, etc.), and that failed. It took a few hours to get it working again.
I've found that it depends highly on what you are doing. I have enough data that I load as far as maps and textures that I exceed the capacity of the Fusion drive. I also use windows for some of my work via bootcamp and that does not work the same as OS X. That being said, I don't see many people using what I use and could probably get away with a Fusion drive and have the same performance (or better) as my SSD. The loading of games could also play a role depending on the amount you have loaded, but good drive management could avoid any slowdowns from maxing out the SSD side of things. If it were me, I'd say "go for it." Read all the posts above and build your own opinion, there's a lot of great feedback above.
My plan is 512 SSD for system / applications / projects I'm actively working on - and a 5TB external for mass storage of everything else, music, video, past work. When I finish a project I'll move it over to the external.
This way I have SSD performance for what I need performance on, don't have to worry about the flash side filling up, and plenty of storage for anything that doesn't need lightning fast access.
This way I have SSD performance for what I need performance on, don't have to worry about the flash side filling up, and plenty of storage for anything that doesn't need lightning fast access.
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People keeps saying that ssd is faster than fusion. I'd like to really know, if it is, how much. Would be nice also to know why. File system rutines can't hinder it much. If you have 128GB ssd side in fusion, I'd guess that most people have 99% of the files they use daily, in ssd side of the fusion. If then fusion is few percentage s slower, I prefer fusion much more. And if you few times a week dig some old files from hdd side of the fusion, they are fast when you open then second time. Only thing I imagine, where you really notice the difference is multi gigabyte video files. But if you keep them on spinning drive and copy them to ssd to work with them, copying takes more time than what is wasted with fusion drive, I guess.
I have an old iMac late 2013 with a Fusion Drive and a late 2015 with an SSD and there is zero difference in performance between the two. I even partition the Fusion Drive and dual boot OSX in the HDD partition and besides the boot time the performance gain is not noticeable.
The SSD-only solution is only faster if you happen to have an use case that doesn't play nicely with the caching algorithm employed by Fusion (large writes or purely random access across your volume. Such as running benchmarks)
If you use your system normally, there is a good chance you won't notice any difference.
Let me know if I'm wrong on any of this - I agree fusion is great for most use - but for production or content creation, you want plenty of the dedicated flash storage immediately available rather than being optimized/prioritized in the background as you work.
For example, Photoshop uses lots of temp storage, creates and erases large amounts of scratch data. With a fusion drive the OS would prioritize my project files to be on flash - but with a I'm not confident it would always have large amounts of available temp space on the flash side. If you tell Photoshop to use the Fusion drive, and the Fusion drive is 80% full, I'd assume it would often be writing to the immediately available mechanical disk space and you'd be losing the performance benefits of flash as you work.
Few other benefits I see to an SSD, less prone to failure then a mechanical drive, and larger SSD's are actually faster.
For example, Photoshop uses lots of temp storage, creates and erases large amounts of scratch data. With a fusion drive the OS would prioritize my project files to be on flash - but with a I'm not confident it would always have large amounts of available temp space on the flash side. If you tell Photoshop to use the Fusion drive, and the Fusion drive is 80% full, I'd assume it would often be writing to the immediately available mechanical disk space and you'd be losing the performance benefits of flash as you work.
Few other benefits I see to an SSD, less prone to failure then a mechanical drive, and larger SSD's are actually faster.
FD keeps 4GB of free space in the ssd side.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/1...ining-doc-ars-tears-open-apples-fusion-drive/
Would be nice, if you could adjust that for 20GB, but since FD is eating Apple's ssd profits, they probably ditch it with the jump to APFS.
Not exactly. Fusion is a caching solution not a type of storage. All writes up to certain threshold go to SSD no matter how much data you have. It is a job of the LVM to make sure that you'll have space on the SSD. It is doing so by demoting least recently and frequently used blocks to HDD. So unless you have a very specific traffic profile (such as you constantly write data) you should mostly experience SSD speeds.
Anyway, almost everything you can do in Photoshop is CPU-bound and no matter which storage technology you use you'll see little actual difference.
I view it as a type of storage then caching. Hybrid drives use flash storage as caching, i.e., temporary storage of data to speed up spinning drives. Fusion drives are closer to a RAID or even JBOD, with logic to put the most used data blocks on the flash storage. To me the major difference is that some data blocks like pieces of the OS stay on the flash drive.
So it acts like cache in one sense, but it also acts like a RAID setup, by logically joining two drives into one.
My iMac is that with an 1Tb HDD + 24Gb SSd. Wondering here if I could split the Fusion Setup and uses the SSD as a separete drive for startup. I could throw my home account to an 512gb USB 3 SSD.
What do you think? It could be possible?
What do you think? It could be possible?
Wouldn't be worth it in my opinion. 24GB is extremely small for a startup disk without customizing out the application folder and log locations etc.
You'd get all the benefits with none of the hassles by just keeping them fused and moving your home folders to an external SSD and only keeping the system files on the Fusion of its the benefit of allowing rarely used applications or logs to overflow the 24GB SSD onto the spinner.
If you want a project, I'd replace the spinner in the Fusion with a large SATA SSD then Fuse those together.
Fravin wrote:
"My iMac is that with an 1Tb HDD + 24Gb SSd. Wondering here if I could split the Fusion Setup and uses the SSD as a separete drive for startup. I could throw my home account to an 512gb USB 3 SSD."
In my opinion, yes, DO get the external USB3 SSD.
BUT -- set it up to be your external booter, with a copy of the OS on it, your apps, your home folder.
It may end up running as fast or faster than the internal fusion drive with the clogged-up 24gb SSD.
Just wondering, what are your drive benchmarks now?
What are your read/write speeds?
"My iMac is that with an 1Tb HDD + 24Gb SSd. Wondering here if I could split the Fusion Setup and uses the SSD as a separete drive for startup. I could throw my home account to an 512gb USB 3 SSD."
In my opinion, yes, DO get the external USB3 SSD.
BUT -- set it up to be your external booter, with a copy of the OS on it, your apps, your home folder.
It may end up running as fast or faster than the internal fusion drive with the clogged-up 24gb SSD.
Just wondering, what are your drive benchmarks now?
What are your read/write speeds?
That project would have no benefits. It would be as fast as current fusion drive.
New large ssd should be used without fusion. Then the old ssd can break without losing system.
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Speed of running an OS from external ssd is about IOPS. Sadly, after extensive googling, I couldn't find any comparisons on IOPS between sata/usb3/tb.