I'm feeling like the disk performance on my old iMac is the only thing that's really bothersome these days, as indicated by occasional very long app start up times. But because it's a Fusion drive I'm having a hard time knowing for sure what's going on. I could also use more space; would like to bump it up to 1.5 TB or 2 TB.
Here's what Blackmagic tells me:
Read is actually not bad; write is highly variable, from about 80 MB/s to 250 MB/s. The reads seem to be coming purely from the SSD for this test.
What is the smartest way to upgrade? I seem to have three options:
1) replace the SATA HD with a SATA SSD, and kill the Fusion drive. I might actually lose a little bit of read speed, but I should get a good improvement in writes, and most of all it should be *consistent*.
2) Put a 2 TB stick in the PCIe slot. That is a heck of a lot more work, but should give a *bit* more performance (this is one of the machines that has a 2-lane PCI2.0 slot, so it's not that much faster than the SATA slot). Again, kill the Fusion drive. I'd probably pull the whole hard drive out at that point and put it in an external case or something.
3) Upgrade my 128 GB stick to a 512 GB stick, and keep the Fusion drive going. With 512 GB, I should spend the vast majority of my time on the SSD, rarely accessing the HD.
I can't tell which of the above gives the best bang for my effort. I like the idea of just putting in a new SATA drive, because it's pretty easy to do, but wonder how much benefit I'll get from it. I'm really just guessing that the slowness I see sometimes is from hitting the spinning drive.
Any thoughts?
Here's what Blackmagic tells me:
Read is actually not bad; write is highly variable, from about 80 MB/s to 250 MB/s. The reads seem to be coming purely from the SSD for this test.
What is the smartest way to upgrade? I seem to have three options:
1) replace the SATA HD with a SATA SSD, and kill the Fusion drive. I might actually lose a little bit of read speed, but I should get a good improvement in writes, and most of all it should be *consistent*.
2) Put a 2 TB stick in the PCIe slot. That is a heck of a lot more work, but should give a *bit* more performance (this is one of the machines that has a 2-lane PCI2.0 slot, so it's not that much faster than the SATA slot). Again, kill the Fusion drive. I'd probably pull the whole hard drive out at that point and put it in an external case or something.
3) Upgrade my 128 GB stick to a 512 GB stick, and keep the Fusion drive going. With 512 GB, I should spend the vast majority of my time on the SSD, rarely accessing the HD.
I can't tell which of the above gives the best bang for my effort. I like the idea of just putting in a new SATA drive, because it's pretty easy to do, but wonder how much benefit I'll get from it. I'm really just guessing that the slowness I see sometimes is from hitting the spinning drive.
Any thoughts?
