It's the greatest of pities Apple didn't carrying on with the 'magnet' method of holding the screen on. With my iMac a couple of suction cups, one gentle pull and you have access to your iMac's innards. Whilst it's still somewhat of a fiddle it is far easier than the present generation to upgrade.
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New 5K iMac: SSD vs Fusion
- Thread starter DrDoug
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It's the greatest of pities Apple didn't carrying on with the 'magnet' method of holding the screen on. With my iMac a couple of suction cups, one gentle pull and you have access to your iMac's innards. Whilst it's still somewhat of a fiddle it is far easier than the present generation to upgrade.
I go with the SSD all day long over Fusion. The speed of the internal SSD's are blistering quick and then pick up an external drive to meet your storage demands.
Personally I prefer more storage outside of the iMac. Reason being, I do all my work on the internal drive then transfer to storage once I'm done. If the iMac completely died one day and I had a Fusion drive how long will it take before I can get access to my stored files again? Troubleshoot the machine, take it to Apple, take it somewhere for them to troubleshoot or me tearing into the machine... none of that is what I want to do.
If my importants are all on a storage drive and my Mac died, I plug the external into another machine and keep going.
What I use and use for my wife's and business partners machine is just a simple USB3 mobile external that doesn't need a power supply. I double side tape it to the rear of the iMac stand and pretty much forget about it from that point on.
My wife doesn't care for super speed so a normal laptop mobile USB3 drive is great for her and give ample space.
I picked up a 1TB SSD and put it inside a USB enclosure and now I have approx. 500MB/s read and write to my external, still quite fast and plenty of space for me.
If you want really quick external storage they make external thunderbolt raid devices. This would give you around 1GB/s read and writes but now we're getting into a whole other price bracket.
Personally I prefer more storage outside of the iMac. Reason being, I do all my work on the internal drive then transfer to storage once I'm done. If the iMac completely died one day and I had a Fusion drive how long will it take before I can get access to my stored files again? Troubleshoot the machine, take it to Apple, take it somewhere for them to troubleshoot or me tearing into the machine... none of that is what I want to do.
If my importants are all on a storage drive and my Mac died, I plug the external into another machine and keep going.
What I use and use for my wife's and business partners machine is just a simple USB3 mobile external that doesn't need a power supply. I double side tape it to the rear of the iMac stand and pretty much forget about it from that point on.
My wife doesn't care for super speed so a normal laptop mobile USB3 drive is great for her and give ample space.
I picked up a 1TB SSD and put it inside a USB enclosure and now I have approx. 500MB/s read and write to my external, still quite fast and plenty of space for me.
If you want really quick external storage they make external thunderbolt raid devices. This would give you around 1GB/s read and writes but now we're getting into a whole other price bracket.
But then it defeats the object of an AIO and ends up as a computer with externally attached peripherals, not elegant and not terribly efficient. I would rather go back to a Windows tower than go down that particular road. At least with a Windows box I could open it up and upgrade components whenever I wanted or simply in order to keep current - all in one unit.
I have a NAS for archiving data or anything I want to access remotely from outside the home.
The issue I have is the need to move my data from internal to external drives. Plus adding a second external drive to backup the original exernal drive. With an internal only drive, the matter is a lot simpler.
Then there's how some apps respond to data on external drives. I'm thinking mostly of iTunes. Every so often it would forget where where the library was (on the external drive) and reset to the internal so then I'd try to play some music and of course it couldn't locate the music on the internal drive since its not there.
Just went through this myself having almost the same scenario as yours. For me, I had a mid 2010 27 iMac (i7, 2TB HHD)...light use in general,,but lots of Lightroom.....just a bit over 1TB used (mostly photos).
I sold it recently for $900 and used the proceeds to upgrade to the 2015 27 inch iMac (stock 2TB fusion model, M395 graphics, 8GB RAM....upgraded via OWC to 24GB). Couldn't be happier with the upgrade. Everything is very fast and the display is beautiful.
I considered the 255GB SSD option (supplemented by external drive via USB 3), but in the end the convenience (and good performance) of the 2TB fusion won out. Personally, I did not want to "manually" manage which files go where (SSD vs HDD).....much more convienent to let the Fusion drive handle it. Plus, with the SSD/External HDD option, the backup strategy gets more complicated (i.e. As you need to back up your external drive via something other than time machine).
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Great to hear that the M395 machine works well for you. Am I correct in assuming that you have the 3.3GHz i5 iMac, or did you go for the i7 again?
How do you organise your library? All on the Fusion drive I suppose? Do you make 1:1 previews or smart previews in LR?
I am also thinking that the backup situation would get a bit clunky. Probably would want an external RAID system via USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt, which could get quite expensive.
hmmm.... so many options...!
you can always go with something like a raid setup http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1260 or a NAS (with this you can have access to you files regardless of your device even if you are away from home http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1650)
I don't like the idea of having two disk that can fail inside and i still need to add an external hdd for backup.
I've used a NAS before, and that in of itself doesn't eliminate the need to backup the data, i.e., RAID is not a data duplication/backup solution. It's great to protect the integrity of the data, but I would still need an external drive for backing up. Plus the performance of the NAS. I'm running a DAS which is much faster, and its now my main backup drive. Before it held my images, music library and anything else that didn't fit on my MBP. I needed then to have another external drive dedicated to backing that up.
The problem with this decision is that Apple has placed the price points in the exact place, and the spec jumps in the wrong spots, to confound me.
If the Fusion drive had a 256gig SSD, I wouldn't think twice. I'd get Fusion. 128gig makes me wonder (despite the mostly glowing reviews of Fusion data management). As for the internal SSD options -- 512gb would be the minimum and my 2006 MBPro already has 400gb and climbing on it upgraded 512SSD. I also think I would suck at moving things around. The 1TB SSD price just peeves me off.
So… 2TB Fusion i7 27" ordered last night.
My hope is that I've over-thought this whole thing and it will be a non-issue once the Fusion figures out what goes where. A little more control would be nice.
If the Fusion drive had a 256gig SSD, I wouldn't think twice. I'd get Fusion. 128gig makes me wonder (despite the mostly glowing reviews of Fusion data management). As for the internal SSD options -- 512gb would be the minimum and my 2006 MBPro already has 400gb and climbing on it upgraded 512SSD. I also think I would suck at moving things around. The 1TB SSD price just peeves me off.
So… 2TB Fusion i7 27" ordered last night.
My hope is that I've over-thought this whole thing and it will be a non-issue once the Fusion figures out what goes where. A little more control would be nice.
Think that's the way I'm headed now too.
Looking like 27" iMac i7 with a Fusion drive and will probably try to max out the GPU.
Although what I'm learning from these forums is that we have 2 good options - both setups work well for people.
So if I find a really quick and cost effective external storage solution - maybe I'll go SSD - but if not, I'll get the fusion drive.