My late 2012 FD which is also on 24/7 original FD, is still going on strong.
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I've read enough about bad Fusion Drives to prepare...
- Thread starter Sal Collaziano
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Quick update. It's about a year and a half now that I've had my iMac with 3TB Fusion Drive. So far, the only place I seem to have heavy lagging is with email. I do use Photoshop a lot and it doesn't open as quickly as it used to - but still "fine". Email, on the other hand, lags a TON. I use Postbox and have 17 email accounts (and 40 browser tabs opened). Sometimes even typing an email is very laggy. I don't know if this is a memory issue, a cpu issue or what - but I'm thinking about buying a new iMac as I use email a LOT and its very frustrating...
There's another question of the author no one has answered yet. I'll question it again:
What if I just purchased an iMac with Fusion, then 10 days later the fusion drive broke? Can I take it to the apple store and ask them to replace the fusion with the SSD Instead and pay the extra?
What if I just purchased an iMac with Fusion, then 10 days later the fusion drive broke? Can I take it to the apple store and ask them to replace the fusion with the SSD Instead and pay the extra?
All I can tell you guys is this: I upgraded (myself) the fusion drive on my 2017 iMac and replaced it with a 4TB Samsung 860 evo (thank you iFixit for the guide). I work in video production and my company has a ton of iMacs with fusion drives. Whenever I use those Macs I am quickly aware how much slower EVERYTHING is on those machines compared to my personal Mac.
Bottom line, the fusion drive is fine if you've lived all your life with just a spinning drive. But compared to ANY SSD it is kinda pathetic ... and a good measure less reliable.
My advice? If you have an iMac and it has a fusion drive, take the little bit of time and effort (or pay someone else to do it) but get a sata SSD in there. You will always wonder why you waited.
P.S. As a bonus, when I replaced the SATA portion of the fusion drive with an SSD and reinstalled the OS, the 128gb SSD portion of the fusion drive is now a secondary drive I can use for anything, like installing a beta of Catalina or whatever.
Bottom line, the fusion drive is fine if you've lived all your life with just a spinning drive. But compared to ANY SSD it is kinda pathetic ... and a good measure less reliable.
My advice? If you have an iMac and it has a fusion drive, take the little bit of time and effort (or pay someone else to do it) but get a sata SSD in there. You will always wonder why you waited.
P.S. As a bonus, when I replaced the SATA portion of the fusion drive with an SSD and reinstalled the OS, the 128gb SSD portion of the fusion drive is now a secondary drive I can use for anything, like installing a beta of Catalina or whatever.
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Not sure about your comments regarding FD v SSD. I have a mid-2011 iMac with a 500 gig EVO SSD and 24 gigs of RAM. My new i5 5K 27inch iMac with a a 2TB FD and 24 gigs of RAM also returns better figures on Black Magic than the EVO. The read times especially are much higher.
Depends what you are doing with your machine really but for me the 2TB FD is exactly what the doctor ordered.
That ‘doctor’ you’re talking to must be from the year 2013. News flash: Its 2019. No one in their right mind should still have a spinning disk inside their newish computer.
The spinning disk is a direct decendent of the phonogragh, circa 1890. Its a method of data storage that’s time is mercifully over in every modern computer, windows or mac, save for a few imacs that still have a fusion drive.
If you still want to claim a fusion drive is as good or better than any current SSD, then all I can say is you need to get out more
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I'm curious. Most SATA 3 SSD right now is only up to 500MBps. But the Fusion Drive on the latest iMacs like 2019 iMac. The speed goes up to 700MBps. Any thoughts on this?
Whatever tests youre referring to must be small read and writes that somehow only use the ssd portion of the fusion drive.
All I can tell you is get an imac side my side, one with a fusion drive and one with a sata ssd and tell me if you see the real world beneift of the all ssd version. I have, and the difference isnt subtle.
As Leo Laport says:
https://techguylabs.com/episodes/1381/should-i-get-mac-fusion-drive
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Well, I think the SSD part of the FD will always leave some space for catching the writes. Then reading the file afterwards, you will always hit the SSD part. So writing a gig or two, reading it again and deleting it may not be a suitable benchmark here.
In real life, you read data from all* places, the SSD will miss, and you get the full performance hit of the HDD.
I don't know exactly what is put on the disk and how much it will shuffle data around. My guess is it favors heavily accessed files, small files, recently used files, and works as a write buffer (which is in line with the recently used files).
* Or you might mostly do the very same tasks, and the SSD has everything cached for you. Which is the use case the manufacturer likes to see.
In real life, you read data from all* places, the SSD will miss, and you get the full performance hit of the HDD.
I don't know exactly what is put on the disk and how much it will shuffle data around. My guess is it favors heavily accessed files, small files, recently used files, and works as a write buffer (which is in line with the recently used files).
* Or you might mostly do the very same tasks, and the SSD has everything cached for you. Which is the use case the manufacturer likes to see.
In real life, the full ssd option isnt so much about the cherry picked reas/write speed of a couple files, but the HUGE advatage of access speeds all across everything you touch (from Computer Life):
“Advantages of SSD over HDD. ... An SSD has access speedsof 35 to 100 microseconds, which is nearly 100 times faster. This faster access speed means programs can run more quickly, which is very significant, especially for programs that accesslarge amounts of data often like your operating system.”
Besides rhe speed advantage of the SSD, theres the reliability question of fusion drives that this thread originally raised:https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macworld.com/article/3326532/fusion-drive-pitfalls.amp.html
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I simply relate from my own experience of having both? Granted the 2011 iMac is somewhat older than my new iMac. However, for my useage it's all the drive I'm ever likely to need and it's oddles cheaper?That ‘doctor’ you’re talking to must be from the year 2013. News flash: Its 2019. No one in their right mind should still have a spinning disk inside their newish computer.
The spinning disk is a direct decendent of the phonogragh, circa 1890. Its a method of data storage that’s time is mercifully over in every modern computer, windows or mac, save for a few imacs that still have a fusion drive.
If you still want to claim a fusion drive is as good or better than any current SSD, then all I can say is you need to get out more
As an aside, the original HDD is still in the 2011 iMac looking after all my large file data. 8 years young and still spinning silently away.
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To me, complaints about Fusion Drive are exaggerated. Slow and dated? No way, in my experience. My former iMac 3Tb Fusion Drive (end 2013 / bought then and used until 2 weeks ago), always worked flawlessly and fast...no problems at all. I bought the 2019 iMac to be more prepared for the future and because of minor irritations when working on large photo files (and with many layers). I'm pretty sure the next owner will be able to use my end 2013 for many years to come.
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Well, I'll stand by my assertion that if you DID get an SSD in there, you'd notice a wonderful difference. And 'oodles cheaper' doesn't mean what it did even a couple years ago when it comes to SSD's. You can now snag a 1TB SSD for about $100 and a 512gb for $60. At those prices I'd submit that even people stretched for cash can afford that.
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OP wrote:
"I use Postbox and have 17 email accounts (and 40 browser tabs opened)"
Jeez.
Close those browser tabs.
ALL of them.
Things will run far better.
And if you are one of those guys who "never reboots", try doing that each day.
If the iMac you have is a 2017 model with USBc/thunderbolt3 ports, consider a Samsung X5 (NOT the t5) in a 512gb size to use as the boot drive.
Things will then go much MUCH MUCH faster.
"I use Postbox and have 17 email accounts (and 40 browser tabs opened)"
Jeez.
Close those browser tabs.
ALL of them.
Things will run far better.
And if you are one of those guys who "never reboots", try doing that each day.
If the iMac you have is a 2017 model with USBc/thunderbolt3 ports, consider a Samsung X5 (NOT the t5) in a 512gb size to use as the boot drive.
Things will then go much MUCH MUCH faster.
Maybe I'll take baby steps for improvements in speed... Adding memory would be easy enough to do - so I think that will be my first step. Would that make any sense? Here's my memory situation with 32GB...
If you are nursing that old of a machine, you don't really know anything about how much better SSD can be. You just know that what you experience is fine for what you do.
At the end of the day surely that's all that matters i.e. what is right for the end user. I'm not nursing that old of a machine either, it never breaks sweat and hasn't done in all the years we've owned it. Do I render video or work on photos - never. The nearest I ever get to videos is taking a short clip of my family which stays in it's original format i.e. I simply play it back on the iMac.