I am sure most of us here are arguing on the basis of iMac pre-installed Fusion config, which is what the OP asked originally. A custom built Fusion especially one with 512 GB SSD is of course a completely different beast, and to achieve your exact setup would require, guess what, to BTO this iMac with 512 GB SSD first, then Fusion it up with an external 6TB HDD via CoreStorage. (or open up the screen glass and stuff in a 3.5" into the SATA bay which I wouldn't recommend)
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Struggling w/2017 i7 storage 1TB SSD vs 3TB Fusion
- Thread starter snowtrooper1966
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spending the absolute most on hardware and trying to run it for >3 years is a fools errand.
save the money, upgrade more frequently and you'll maintain warranty and end up with a faster experience on average. so long as you spec "high enough" to cover your workload, any further money spent today is money that will get you more hardware for the dollar in 2-3 years time.
buying absolute top of the line and trying to push hardware life unless you need it today is getting maybe 10% more performance for a huge additional outlay usually.
plus, if you turn the machine over after 3 years, you'll actually get some money back for it that can go towards your new machine, instead of trying to offload a broken, useless basket case in say 5+ years.
edit:
to clarify: if you need top of the line and money is no object, go for it. but trying to push hardware way beyond 3 years is wasting your time, playing russian roulette with hardware reliability, etc.
If you truly need the best, you should be upgrading more frequently, not less. a mid-range machine from 3 years in the future generally outperforms a top end machine from today; this has held true for about as long as I've been dealing with computers (30+ years).
Buying higher spec than you otherwise would in order to try and eke out a little more life generally isn't worth it.
Essentially Apple's 3 tiers of hardware within a product go something like this:
Entry: I'm a cheap skate or very light user
Mid: This is what most people should buy if you arent' going to recoup funds through increased productivity
High end: Money is no object/work pays/i use this to make money
Whichever tier you buy, planning replacement after 3-4 years is prudent.
save the money, upgrade more frequently and you'll maintain warranty and end up with a faster experience on average. so long as you spec "high enough" to cover your workload, any further money spent today is money that will get you more hardware for the dollar in 2-3 years time.
buying absolute top of the line and trying to push hardware life unless you need it today is getting maybe 10% more performance for a huge additional outlay usually.
plus, if you turn the machine over after 3 years, you'll actually get some money back for it that can go towards your new machine, instead of trying to offload a broken, useless basket case in say 5+ years.
edit:
to clarify: if you need top of the line and money is no object, go for it. but trying to push hardware way beyond 3 years is wasting your time, playing russian roulette with hardware reliability, etc.
If you truly need the best, you should be upgrading more frequently, not less. a mid-range machine from 3 years in the future generally outperforms a top end machine from today; this has held true for about as long as I've been dealing with computers (30+ years).
Buying higher spec than you otherwise would in order to try and eke out a little more life generally isn't worth it.
Essentially Apple's 3 tiers of hardware within a product go something like this:
Entry: I'm a cheap skate or very light user
Mid: This is what most people should buy if you arent' going to recoup funds through increased productivity
High end: Money is no object/work pays/i use this to make money
Whichever tier you buy, planning replacement after 3-4 years is prudent.
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I opted for the 3tb fusion, i7, 580 GPU and user upgraded to 40GB ram on my new 27 inch. I added an external 1TB SSD from OTC. My old Pro Mac with all 4 bays full is now a file server.
My Photos library is 38,000 photos and about 300gb in size. I'm glad I went this route - no regrets at all. I hate running out of internal drive space (hate!) and was too cheap to go 2tb ssd. This machine in real world usage is so amazingly fast I detect no bottlenecks at all.
But I'd still like to see the numbers - SSD of various sizes versus 3tb fusion. The fact they aren't part of this discussion means they are probably not major. SSD will be faster - for sure - but how much faster in the real world?
My 2 cents - go with the biggest fusion and forgetabout it. Unless $$ is no object in which case you wouldn't have posted.
My Photos library is 38,000 photos and about 300gb in size. I'm glad I went this route - no regrets at all. I hate running out of internal drive space (hate!) and was too cheap to go 2tb ssd. This machine in real world usage is so amazingly fast I detect no bottlenecks at all.
But I'd still like to see the numbers - SSD of various sizes versus 3tb fusion. The fact they aren't part of this discussion means they are probably not major. SSD will be faster - for sure - but how much faster in the real world?
My 2 cents - go with the biggest fusion and forgetabout it. Unless $$ is no object in which case you wouldn't have posted.
Points well taken, but with a few observations.
Apple historically holds its value in the aftermarket well beyond what competitor's hardware does.
I was ready to use buyback offer of 200 for my current in use late 2015 BTO Mac Mini, when a quick check of recent sales of similarly specd units have sold in the 500 to 800 range.
Point being, over specing a current purchase can hedge against traditional instant obsolescence and yield a higher return down the road in resell value...
Difference is orders of Magnitude for some tasks. 2000MB/s sequential for native SSD, vs half of that when file is on SSD portion, <1/20th of that if on HDD. (numbers very rough but you get an idea). The argument against Fusion usually lies on the 128GB SSD that it comes with, for those who don't have frequently accessed file more than that then the Fusion experience is likely not bad, but for the others it is essentially just a hybrid SSHD with a small cache that slows down all the time like a regular HDD.
Your use case with Photos actually limits your choice btw, as it requires a managed singular library so you cannot separate the database on faster SSD while keeping RAWs on slower HDDs. With other DAM software like Lightroom users can optimize workflow further by a clear separation of catalog database + cache, vs a very large back log of RAWs on multiple slower HDD (arrays).
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Somewhat. But if you sell after 3 years or less you get most of your money back anyway, and when you upgrade you end up with a superior machine to what you would have been trying to push out for 4-5 or more years.
Going from say mid-spec to high spec isn't cheap and other than RAM the performance jump is likely in the order of 10%. Unless you have some very specific requirements or are talking about more cores in a Mac Pro.
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Yup, definitely.
If you're working with large video files (tens of GB) i would wager that the fusion drive will be extremely annoying because the cache either won't cope, or everything else will end up evicted from the cache while you're working with video. Either way, performance will suffer.
SSD performance makes a huge difference to video editing.
If you don't do video and don't plan to, fusion may be OK, but if you do, i'd avoid the Fusion setup, even if it means you need to hook up an external hard drive or NAS for completed projects or media library archive so you can work with current stuff from SSD. The performance difference is huge.
To give you an idea just how essential it is...
Worst case, assuming your fusion drive runs out of cache and you're effectively working from the hard drive part of the setup - I've seen the difference between my Desktop PC before i stuck an SSD in it. (Xeon e3-1231v3 with 32 GB of RAM) getting beaten by my 13" Retina editing video. Ditto for my SSHD in my old 2011 Quad core MBP with 16 GB of RAM being beaten by the 13" Retina with otherwise vastly inferior spec.
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LOL, correct.
If money was no object, it would be 2TB SSD w/an external SSD RAID
Its comments like these (from other threads on these forums) that have be struggling, with the caveat that these are subjective and offered without empirical evidence....
"Meaning that if you chose the fusion drive, it's performance would impact the processors performance. Whereas the SSD doesn't impact the processor performance. With the spinning drive, anytime the processor needs to use information on it, the time to access and process that information takes 3-4 times longer than with SSD. For me getting the SSD is a no-brainer. I chose the 3.8 w/SSD"
"Fusion drive is fine until one fills up the SSD. Then anything on the HDD has enormously higher seek times."
"I have used SSDs for system drives since 2009 - never ever going back.
I also have owned the 2013 MP with its 1000MB/s R/W PCIe SSD. In use - there is no difference again between it and the 2 to 3X faster one in the iMac. File copy is sure faster though."
Definitely, living with SSD only is going to require changes to habits.
But again as per my above post, if you need/want to work with video, especially HD or 4k, a fusion drive or even worse, spinning hard drive only just isn't going to cut it, no matter how high spec the rest of the machine is.
But again as per my above post, if you need/want to work with video, especially HD or 4k, a fusion drive or even worse, spinning hard drive only just isn't going to cut it, no matter how high spec the rest of the machine is.
If you already spare part of the budget towards an external HDD, then there is no real need to force the 1TB internal SSD BTO. Save yourself with the 512GB and invest all of the rest on the biggest ext you can afford. The WD My Book 8+8TB USB3 is like 450.
I think you got enough different users' perspective in this thread, the rest is just to make up your mind.
I think you got enough different users' perspective in this thread, the rest is just to make up your mind.
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I dig this idea, but know nothing about using CoreStorage.
Assuming I did go with a 512GB SSD and 5TB external, wonder what the performance benefits are and the minimum platter speed/interface connection would be to realize these....
I have gone with SSDs internally since the early days and never looked back. And one of the many reasons my main Mac is a hackintosh is the multiple SATA, M.2 and PCIe ports; no need to buy 1TB for a desktop when 2x512GB costs much cheaper and so on. That doesn't mean I don't have external drives (mechanical or SSDs), e.g. for backup or slow data I don't have to access every day. The price is nothing compared to the speed, convenience, flexibility and quietness.
Just don't bother.
2c. but doing things like Fusion drives with externally connected media that can be accidentally disconnected, etc. is just asking for failure and you're getting way far into "officially unsupported for good reason"....
I'd get a large enough internal SSD to hold your current projects and stuff that needs high speed, then just archive everything completed or bulk media to external media like a NAS.
You took it the wrong way, my comment wasn't a suggestion, it was to show the stretch and trade off involved with building a Fusion array on par with that guy's custom internal one.
IMO, having to manage files over multiple physical volumes has always been an inevitable part of a growing computing life of anyone. Trying to stay away from it by having a single drive solution is just limiting your options.
Much truth here.
Eventually, no matter how much storage you buy, you run into the issue of bulk archival requirements (lots of space, who cares about speed) vs. current projects (small subset of your data, want it to be FAST).
In theory, SSD+spinning disk caching is helpful, but the reality is there is an overhead associated with it, and due to this, you may end up not running from the SSD cache as much as you would like. The system also has to shuffle data on/off the cache; i'm not talking specifically regarding fusion drives here, but with any auto-tiering disk system. This is an overhead that has to run at some point, causing your drives to be busy doing that at some point. Hopefully when you're not using them aggressively, but occasionally if it needs to juggle the cache while you work (due to say, a large amount of new data to write to disk after your write cache is full), it will have to try and do that while you're actively working with it.
More specifically regarding fusion drives, I've seen/heard much online about the scheme apple uses for the tiering being somewhat retarded - it just doesn't work as efficiently as it probably should. Part of that is because Apple aren't storage experts (HFS+, and even the new AppleFS show this to a degree - APFS is better than HFS, but it's by no means cutting edge - its behind where ZFS was about 15 years ago). Partly this may be due to caching just not working as well as we would hope for a single user's data.
Enterprise SANs do the tiered caching thing (I have a few at work, Netapps with Flashcache), but the caching on that is block level and based on hundreds of users hitting it. So if something SHOULD be cached, by the time you hit it, someone (or maybe plenty of other users) else probably caused it to be there by accessing it many times before you. With many users, SSD cache also helps serialise thousands of concurrent random IO requests into big block writes to the hard disk (which hard disks dont suck at so bad) by buffering them on the SSD (combining say 10,000 small writes into one big write to hard disk).
With a single user system, YOU are going to be that user having the cache miss (and falling back to the hard drive) whenever it happens. Fusion will be better than a hard drive, sure. But it won't be anywhere near as fast as a pure SSD setup. Also on a single user system, you aren't doing thousands of concurrent random IO requests. Because there's only one user generating them.
When dealing with any significant quantities of brand new data (e.g, processing some new video you imported for example), any fusion setup is either going to be spending half its time shuffling data around to aggressively cache anything new and push the old stuff to hard disk, or you'll be hitting the non-SSD storage several times before it learns to cache it. If you use SSD for current projects, it goes on SSD first time until you're done with it...
TLDR:
caching works a lot better with many users on the same storage. it is less great when you're the only user of it. Also, once you exceed the amount of SSD cache you have, it's all downhill performance wise from there. It's better than no cache for sure. Just don't expect it to be same as an SSD-only drive because it just won't be. It's not a magic bullet unfortunately.
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I have to agree with the replace more often philosophy. For me ~2.5yrs with Apple Care is the time to sell and get whatever the new one is. I find this my most agreeable method for both my office and my studio machines. The office one is for light work mostly - 13.3" laptop. I find silence there the best and mid or lowest tier i5 with all SSD has been my choice for the last 3 machines. My 2016 MBP is sitting here right now with a fan speed of Zero! I don't know if this is recent on Sierra but running <50degC and zero fan in clamshell mode - pretty darned cool!
Studio computer is 90% pro audio and 10% video (simple stuff). I have had 4 Drives for this set up for 20 years - OS, Samples (for Virtual Instruments), Audio, Backup with 3 in a TB 4 bay rack unit. In this iteration I am trying a 1TB internal SSD (3 partitions - OS, Audio, Samples) and one BU USB3 drive. The BU is in a 2 bay dock so easy to add overflow or other things. The internal drive is >5X faster to write to and almost 10X faster to read from than any simple external solution so should be way better than the multidrive version.
The "need" for SSD with the samples drive is super fast random access to lots of small samples for virtual instruments. I am allowing ~600GB for just this purpose (currently use ~400GB). I can always move any non critical sample libraries to a USB3 SSD if space gets to be a problem. Keeping my daily work folder to 250GB forces me to finish and archive things rather than leave them in a half done state. Would have gone 2TB SSD this time but will save that for 2019
Studio computer is 90% pro audio and 10% video (simple stuff). I have had 4 Drives for this set up for 20 years - OS, Samples (for Virtual Instruments), Audio, Backup with 3 in a TB 4 bay rack unit. In this iteration I am trying a 1TB internal SSD (3 partitions - OS, Audio, Samples) and one BU USB3 drive. The BU is in a 2 bay dock so easy to add overflow or other things. The internal drive is >5X faster to write to and almost 10X faster to read from than any simple external solution so should be way better than the multidrive version.
The "need" for SSD with the samples drive is super fast random access to lots of small samples for virtual instruments. I am allowing ~600GB for just this purpose (currently use ~400GB). I can always move any non critical sample libraries to a USB3 SSD if space gets to be a problem. Keeping my daily work folder to 250GB forces me to finish and archive things rather than leave them in a half done state. Would have gone 2TB SSD this time but will save that for 2019
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So, this happened
Wound up getting a discount I did not even realize was possible, so was able to get everything I was after with just 80 more out the door than what I was expecting, and free headphones. The $300 price differential allowed me to add Applecare+ now and get the faster 7200 external w/Thunderbolt 3.
Will be buying the extra 32GB of RAM shortly, to arrive before the iMac.
THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to help....
Wound up getting a discount I did not even realize was possible, so was able to get everything I was after with just 80 more out the door than what I was expecting, and free headphones. The $300 price differential allowed me to add Applecare+ now and get the faster 7200 external w/Thunderbolt 3.
Will be buying the extra 32GB of RAM shortly, to arrive before the iMac.
THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to help....
Awesome, i'm sure you'll be ecstatic with the performance. The SSD really will help anything to do with video and 1TB should be more than comfortable for "work in progress" stuff.
Fusion Drive is not caching but tiering. It works on a block level. And the write cache is about 4Gb.
You will notice the slow HDD if you write more than 4Gb of new data in a short period of time or if you have more than 128Gb of data you always use.
I always recommend Fusion Drives (with 128Gb SSD) if one wants to save money and your workflow does not involve heavy file I/O.
Tier-ing is caching, just a slightly different strategy regarding the utilisation of the faster storage. IN any case, same rule of thumb applies: It's not a magic bullet and if you have large reads or writes then the stuff you are working with, especially if it is new work is likely not going to be all in the cache.
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Tier-ing is actually worse as it means the data exists only in one storage area at a time and must be MOVED when it no longer belongs in the cache, rather than just dropped from the cache. This is slower...
Jealous, not only over this awesome iMac but its price. Is this student pricing?
In lieu of being blasted with self righteousness I would like to game the system. When I bought my current Mac, coincidentally a friend of mine that was with me worked for Geico and got a discount, they just gave it to me because the dude was cool and didn't care. I tried it again (I know I know I'm a cheap ass) with an iPad but they lady wasn't having it, bought it anyway just figured I would try again.
Yes, student / educational.
Was chatting with CSR about drives, and couldn't find platter speed (7200) & USB-C combo I wanted, so settled on the 5400 G-Tech.
Decided it was finally time to go ahead w/purchase of the 27" setup, and as I was checking out with chat help (had 2 Apple store gift cards and a small balance on CC, so figured it was going to be convoluted) saw a space for promo code.
I asked if there was any available, and she replied asking If I was a student, or educational / government employee.
I told her I volunteer at my sons school, then next thing I knew she forwarded the bag I posted above, with 200 off the iMac, free headphones and a few other discounts on the upgrades. Didn't ask for any verification, and because of the applied discounts was able to change to order to include the faster external w/TB 3 connector and add AppleCare+.
Also, as I was shopping that later that evening elsewhere for the 32GB RAM upgrade kit, saw the same drive for 50 buck less.
Called the next day and was told they don't price match, but when I suggested that I would cancel the drive purchase and buy elsewhere, she applied another 40 bucks off...so 350ish total, plus the free 300 Beats.
Fairly stoked on how this purchase turned out for us, and looking forward to it's arrival in the next week....
After several weeks of thinking about this, this is my conclusion is well. I'm currently specing out a new 27 inch iMac, and not sure if I should choose the 1 TB SSD or 2 TB SSD. It isn't cheap at $1400, but I can afford the 2 TB, so I'll probably just go for it. I do a lot of photography, and what the photographers have said in this thread makes perfect sense to me.