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Why the Hate for Fusion Drives?

And like all manufacturers Apple is required to put into the market place a product at a price buyers want. Some want the lowest options, so sure the Fusion Drive is just fine for them. If one wants the higher speed, higher performance SSD, you pay for it so don't whine Apple are ripping you off ~ you want better options it costs more bucks.

For mine I have gone with 1TB PCI-e Flash Storage, and will do the same when the iMac Pro is released. It will cost more but if I want it I will pay more If one wants the newest Samsung 960 Pro Blade Drive, 512GB, I do not think the price is unreal at AUD$640.00 or thereabouts.
 
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richpjr said:
Sorry, poor word choice on my part. I was referring to the mechanical portion of the Fusion Drive.
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That's the point of a Fusion drive, spinner with SSD. I would agree that 7200 RPM spinner should be used. It can be a good comprise to achieve good performance at a lower cost to the user. High performance SSD of any substantial size is still too expensive for a lot of people. And I don't mean SATA III SSD.
 
richpjr said:
For a company that has no problem pushing the envelope technology-wise by eliminating floppy drives, dvds and then forces TB3 ports only on it's new MBPs, it seems very curious that they stick with something as dated as a hybrid-mechanical drive.
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It is in transitional stage. Prices for SSD will come down in X years and by then HDD usage will minimise.
 
richpjr said:
It is in transitional stage. Prices for SSD will come down in X years and by then HDD usage will minimise.
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Fusion drive isn't necessary about HDD. It is a caching solution. Caching is proven by decades. I think there is a chance that even in the future there will be a practical need for fusing relatively small ultrafast storage with cheap large bulk storage. I don't the SSD is an endgame. Perhaps in a few years from now, we will be fusing something even better with slow SSDs.
 
After some hesitation, I chose the 2GB fusion drive. The 1TB SSD was already pricy enough, and the 2TB option is just too much. I already had some experience with fusion drives and I find them to be very good compromises. Startup time is basically as fast as on an SSD. Apps you use regularly launch very fast.
From a usage standpoint, a fusion drive is much closer to an SDD than it is to an HDD.
 
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mpe said:
I think there is a chance that even in the future there will be a practical need for fusing relatively small ultrafast storage with cheap large bulk storage.
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An intriguing idea! Perhaps it could be called the Fusion Drive! :p

jeanlain said:
After some hesitation, I chose the 2GB fusion drive. The 1TB SSD was already pricy enough, and the 2TB option is just too much. I already had some experience with fusion drives and I find them to be very good compromises. Startup time is basically as fast as on an SSD. Apps you use regularly launch very fast.
From a usage standpoint, a fusion drive is much closer to an SDD than it is to an HDD.
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I made the same choice (I assume you meant 2TB Fusion) and I couldn't be happier. If money were no object, SSD would be best and I'm sure my next computer years from now will have it, but for now I enjoy having the large storage internally and it works beautifully. I look at it as a 128GB SSD plus lots of internal bonus storage at no extra charge. I'm sure I can find something better to spend $1400 on than an SSD.
 
I believe there is a purist mentality with many people who use these tech forums. Spinners are old technology and are therefore looked down upon.... I find it frustrating that people also go on about fusion drives only having 5400rpm hard drives when all the 27" iMacs have 7200rpm drives paired with an ssd.
 
mpe said:
Fusion drive isn't necessary about HDD. It is a caching solution. Caching is proven by decades. I think there is a chance that even in the future there will be a practical need for fusing relatively small ultrafast storage with cheap large bulk storage. I don't the SSD is an endgame. Perhaps in a few years from now, we will be fusing something even better with slow SSDs.
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SSDs will be replaced by NVMe in the future.
Capacity of SSDs are ever increasing 32TB soon to be in the order of 100TB,
 
aoaaron said:
SSDs arent that expensive. I just bought a 1TB to put in my gaming rig.
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Yeah...those cheap SATA drive can be easily installed with a USB 3 enclosure but not everyone like external drive... and they are "very slow" 400-500MB/s

You can eventually in the future use the internal HDD for time machine, and create a fusion drive of the internal SSD + cheap sata external SSD
 
SATA SSD are not slow.
I am pretty sure you can't notice the difference with PCIe ultra fast SSD with normal usage.
Except in benchmarks ...
 
rbart said:
SATA SSD are not slow.
I am pretty sure you can't notice the difference with PCIe ultra fast SSD with normal usage.
Except in benchmarks ...
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you do when to move a huge file a file you need one fourth of the time or less, there is the same speed difference between a HDD and a sata ssd then to a sata ssd and the one integrated on mac, still you can buy a non cheap Samsung 960 EVO M.2 eventually, TB3 enclosure should be cheap next year
 
And you copy large files all the day ?
How many times a day you internally copy big files ?
If it's only moving files, it takes less than one second.
If you copy it's more, but it will be less than one second with APFS.

3x times faster, 3x times more expensive ...
For a geek, it's pleasant to see nice marks in benchmarks, but when you use the Mac you can't notice the difference between a fast SATA SSD and an ULTRAFAST PCIe SSD.
 
rbart said:
And you copy large files all the day ?
How many times a day you internally copy big files ?
If it's only moving files, it takes less than one second.
If you copy it's more, but it will be less than one second with APFS.

3x times faster, 3x times more expensive ...
For a geek, it's pleasant to see nice marks in benchmarks, but when you use the Mac you can't notice the difference between a fast SATA SSD and an ULTRAFAST PCIe SSD.
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It's way above 3x but ok you are right...there is no difference.
 
SSD vs HDD/Fusion - depends on what... if the data is say in RAM, no you won't see a difference.
However latency on a HDD is round 12ms, you will 100% see that be it a read or a write when set against a SSD drive. The SSD performance profile is actually better on random IO rather than sequential vs HDDs, while you will see improvements on sequential IO its not as pronounced as random actions.

Daily operation are 75/25% (read/write) and 98/2% (random/sequential) over a 32k (on mine at least) block size
The bigger the file, more random blocks that generally need to be read.
 
What's the difference between a SATA SSD and the ones Mac uses internally?

I have a 2010 Macbook Bro that my computer friend installed a 500GB SATA SSD in. It wasn't that expensive and I was rather surprised because I thought SSD was always way more. The performance so far has been slightly better, but I don't really see the difference between it and my older HDD.
 
JasonMovieGuy said:
What's the difference between a SATA SSD and the ones Mac uses internally?

I have a 2010 Macbook Bro that my computer friend installed a 500GB SATA SSD in. It wasn't that expensive and I was rather surprised because I thought SSD was always way more. The performance so far has been slightly better, but I don't really see the difference between it and my older HDD.
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in terms of pure reading and writing speed about 400/430Mbps vs 2000/2800Mbps
 
I'ts the interface, SATA is a drive interface of old, SATA 3 runs at "upto" 6Gps, SATA 2 is "upto" 2Gbps
PCie SSDs use lanes to access the data, so it depends on the size, but for example a 256GB 850pro has 4 lanes and runs at 1400MB/s (11Gb/s) so its nearly x2 on SATA3 or x6 on SATA2. This is why when you see the BlackMagic benchmarks on here, the bigger drives are getting faster throughput numbers (I/O) due to having more lanes.

Think of it this way, SATA is now what IDE used to be. PCie is the new SATA.
 
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