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Why the Hate for Fusion Drives?
- Thread starter whodatrr
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That's true. Three SSDs I owned died. One after a few days, one after 6 months and one after 9 months. The last one was a PCI-E flash drive in a MacBook air.
All I owned after that were in Computers I sold after a few month.
The three I have now are just 5 months old (two are in a MacBook Pro Late 2011 and one in a MacBook Mid 2010).
And then there is also the one from the Fusion Drive in my just 2 weeks old iMac.
I disabled the Fusion Drive because i really need very less space. The HDD is only used for Time Machine backups. I feel better with two drives in it. If one of them dies the iMac is still usable without an external drive and I bet the SSD will be the first one.
I can't remember that any HDD got damaged in my whole life, none in my own Computers, none in my family's, none in my friends', none at work...
The 20 MB HDD of my first 6 MHz Intel 80186 PC still worked after over 20 years, until my parents throw it away.
Thank you for providing a perfect example of one of the types of Fusion hater I described in my post.
Spinning discs fail much more often.
That's true. Three SSDs I owned died. One after a few days, one after 6 months and one after 9 months. The last one was a PCI-E flash drive in a MacBook air.
All I owned after that were in Computers I sold after a few month.
The three I have now are just 5 months old (two are in a MacBook Pro Late 2011 and one in a MacBook Mid 2010).
And then there is also the one from the Fusion Drive in my just 2 weeks old iMac.
I disabled the Fusion Drive because i really need very less space. The HDD is only used for Time Machine backups. I feel better with two drives in it. If one of them dies the iMac is still usable without an external drive and I bet the SSD will be the first one.
I can't remember that any HDD got damaged in my whole life, none in my own Computers, none in my family's, none in my friends', none at work...
The 20 MB HDD of my first 6 MHz Intel 80186 PC still worked after over 20 years, until my parents throw it away.
Seems quite absurd to me given that in more than a decade of use, I've never had any solid state memory device fail, whether it be SSDs, compact flash, SD cards, or flash drives. In 20 years of use, I've had 4 traditional hard drives fail.
That's true. Three SSDs I owned died. One after a few days, one after 6 months and one after 9 months. The last one was a PCI-E flash drive in a MacBook air.
All I owned after that were in Computers I sold after a few month.
The three I have now are just 5 months old (two are in a MacBook Pro Late 2011 and one in a MacBook Mid 2010).
And then there is also the one from the Fusion Drive in my just 2 weeks old iMac.
I disabled the Fusion Drive because i really need very less space. The HDD is only used for Time Machine backups. I feel better with two drives in it. If one of them dies the iMac is still usable without an external drive and I bet the SSD will be the first one.
I can't remember that any HDD got damaged in my whole life, none in my own Computers, none in my family's, none in my friends', none at work...
The 20 MB HDD of my first 6 MHz Intel 80186 PC still worked after over 20 years, until my parents throw it away.
You know, maybe there is a curse on you to not use SSDs because they will turn on you and fail. I say, keep using HDDs, they apparently work better for you and the family.
Your individual experience is not highly revealing in cases like this. One of the largest reliability studies ever done showed a very wide range of failure rates for both HDD and SSD. In some cases SSD failure rate was higher than HDD:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html
All the data I saw in that article says that SSDs fail less than HDDs. Sure, the SSDs weren't as old on average, but that doesn't mean you can conclude that they would fail as much or more than HDDs when they're older.
Both the data in that article, and my own experience, says that HDDs are inferior in reliability.
....and in no way the same or even comparable to the flash that is used in the iMac.
One advantage of HDD is, that they usually Show you that they will fail in a certain time. So you will usually be able to save at least a big part of your data. SSDs are dead from one second to the other, because it's usually the controller that fails.
I owned a windows laptop in the past and the hard drive malfunctioned after about 4 months. It failed to boot up windows. I was so scared because all my notes were on there and I thought I was doomed. I did a google for a treatment and read about dropping the hard drive a few inches from the surface. Didn't think it would work but the thing booted up! It worked fine since then but it made me questioned the reliability of HDDs..
The idea behind Fusion Drive is great, for me: the advatange of an SSD 95% of time and the huge storage offered by a magnetic drive. the problems are:
- I want to use a quiet machine so a magnetic drive is not good for noise
- For me 256 GB are absolutely enough for now. So i buy the 512 GB model to be sure that I' ve no problem in the near future. I don' t need 2 TB of storage
- My idea is to keep the 5K iMac that I' m going to order for about 4 years and the current iMac design is near impossible to open.....drive with moving part are more likely to have problem and I can' t open this computer if the warranty is ended.
- Apple made a bad choice with the 1TB drive with the small amount of SSD capacity.
Nobody is questioning that SSD in *general* is more reliable than HDD, only that SSD can have *significant* failure probabilities depending on the make, model and age. That article and study clearly shows in some cases SSD has proven less reliable than HDD. That is obvious from this chart: http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/T/302141/original/ssdfailurerates_1024.png
From that we can see several things:
- SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs
- HDD failure chance increases significantly with time (and more rapidly than SSDs)
- SSD failure chance also increases with time, despite having no moving parts
- Some SSDs are *less* reliable than some HDDs, out to 4.5 years
Unfortunately you can never know this ahead of time -- it's only revealed afterward after statistical study of a large population.
If you don't think you'll ever need more than 512, than you have an easy decision. But many others don't have that luxury. Only two minor points:
Noise - I think all of this hoopla about noisiness is, again, form people who've never had a Fusion drive. These are not the old flankers you may be used to, and with the SSD taking on much of the work, they don;t seem to get stressed. I now have two of them running and I can't hear squat. I can vaguely hear fans and could hear the external USB drive that I was running a while ago. Frankly, the loudest think in my office is a couple older LED bulbs that I need to upgrade. But I can't hear the Fusion drive. So, again, I think this is misplaced
Reliability (MTBF) - Yes, the Fusion drive includes mechanical components. But the technology is very mature, and these spinners are much more reliable than ones from 10 years ago. In my experience, spinners mostly fail under two circumstances: mobile drives being tossed about, and drives that were developed to an extreme capacity. As this drive won't be carried around in a laptop, and since 3TB is by no means pushing any capacity envelop, I think this sucker will run just fine for many years. Still, whatever type of drive you have, backup frequently. They can all fail. My last drive failure was the SSD on my Surface RT... no idea what happened there?
As this thread started out, if you only need 256G or maybe even 512G, SSD makes perfect sense. But if your needs go beyond that, don't let misperceptions like: Fusion drives are slow, Fusion drives are noisy, Fusion drives are heaters, Fusion Drives are time bombs and other silly stuff make you lay down a lot more cash for what will likely amount to very little difference in your iMac experience.
Noise - I think all of this hoopla about noisiness is, again, form people who've never had a Fusion drive. These are not the old flankers you may be used to, and with the SSD taking on much of the work, they don;t seem to get stressed. I now have two of them running and I can't hear squat. I can vaguely hear fans and could hear the external USB drive that I was running a while ago. Frankly, the loudest think in my office is a couple older LED bulbs that I need to upgrade. But I can't hear the Fusion drive. So, again, I think this is misplaced
Reliability (MTBF) - Yes, the Fusion drive includes mechanical components. But the technology is very mature, and these spinners are much more reliable than ones from 10 years ago. In my experience, spinners mostly fail under two circumstances: mobile drives being tossed about, and drives that were developed to an extreme capacity. As this drive won't be carried around in a laptop, and since 3TB is by no means pushing any capacity envelop, I think this sucker will run just fine for many years. Still, whatever type of drive you have, backup frequently. They can all fail. My last drive failure was the SSD on my Surface RT... no idea what happened there?
As this thread started out, if you only need 256G or maybe even 512G, SSD makes perfect sense. But if your needs go beyond that, don't let misperceptions like: Fusion drives are slow, Fusion drives are noisy, Fusion drives are heaters, Fusion Drives are time bombs and other silly stuff make you lay down a lot more cash for what will likely amount to very little difference in your iMac experience.
The problem with Fusion drives isn't the HDD per se, it's the make of HDD Apple has been using... if Apple used HGST rather than Seagate, I'd say go for it. But Seagate (and now Samsung, since Seagate bought Samsung's HDD business), I'd steer clear of. Seagate just don't have a reputation for excellence in their consumer-grade hard drives.
Noise and mostly speed is why I usually opt for a SSD. Thanks to the thunderbolt interface, if anything doesn't fit on my SSD, I push it over to my Drobo
It seems the HDD in the new iMac 5k with 2TB Fusion Drive is a 3.5-inch Seagate Barracuda (ST2000DM001) 7200rpm, 64 MB Cache, SATA III.
On amazon.de it's listed since November 24, 2011. Did they really put such an old model in there?
Is that one still a "real" Seagate or Samsung? What would be better?
I hadn't even perceived said hate. I was curious but skeptical when they were first introduced, but I've used one for two years and think it's fantastic – really fast, and the software completely takes care of managing it.
It seem hard to guess at the real-world difference made by a smaller Flash component without knowing more about what the software is doing to manage that, and I'm guessing it also varies by user. It seems likely some everyday users just wouldn't need 128GB of Flash to see similar real-world performance from it.
It seem hard to guess at the real-world difference made by a smaller Flash component without knowing more about what the software is doing to manage that, and I'm guessing it also varies by user. It seems likely some everyday users just wouldn't need 128GB of Flash to see similar real-world performance from it.
I doubt they've updated anything much more than the firmware in those Barracudas, and no they're not a Samsung.
What would be better is if Apple didn't buy the cheapest hdd they can source into their Macs. HGST is my choice, but it's generally a bit dearer.
I will be glad when Flash becomes a lot cheaper. I'm still holding out with a 21 inch iMac from 2009 that has a 7200 RPM spinner. It works but it is slow as hell on video editing and opening applications.
I work with enterprise grade storage arrays, and when I bought my first Mac - a 2012 Mac Mini, what I read about how fusion drives made a lot of sense. It works in a similar way, at least for read operation, to an auto-tiering array, while writes are cached to SSD, then moved to the HDD as required.
It is obviously a transitional technology, as auto-tiering on enterprise arrays was, and will become less relevant as SSD capacities increase and costs decrease. This is already starting to happen in the enterprise storage space, with 4TB SSDs available, and all flash arrays being one of the fastest growing categories. Obviously costs are along way from desktop computer land.
So anyway, knowing all this, I bought my first Mac with fusion drive, and was really impressed with the performance and how transparent to the user its operation was. I would not hesitate to buy another Mac with fusion drive again, and here is the thing, depending on the use case of the Mac. All the available options are viable for one use case or another, even the 1tb fusion with 24gb SSD. The Mac mini in my media centre gets by with a 5400 rpm HDD And the only time I notice is if I need to reboot after an update or the like.
But please, whatever you choose, backup your Mac! Preferably to multiple destinations. Hard drives fail. SSDs fail. And one thing I do have to agree with the fusion haters on, is that like a RAID 0 array, fusion actually doubles your chances of having a failure causing data loss. If either physical drive fails, the whole fusion drive will fail. But not having fusion does not excuse you from having a decent backup strategy.
It is obviously a transitional technology, as auto-tiering on enterprise arrays was, and will become less relevant as SSD capacities increase and costs decrease. This is already starting to happen in the enterprise storage space, with 4TB SSDs available, and all flash arrays being one of the fastest growing categories. Obviously costs are along way from desktop computer land.
So anyway, knowing all this, I bought my first Mac with fusion drive, and was really impressed with the performance and how transparent to the user its operation was. I would not hesitate to buy another Mac with fusion drive again, and here is the thing, depending on the use case of the Mac. All the available options are viable for one use case or another, even the 1tb fusion with 24gb SSD. The Mac mini in my media centre gets by with a 5400 rpm HDD And the only time I notice is if I need to reboot after an update or the like.
But please, whatever you choose, backup your Mac! Preferably to multiple destinations. Hard drives fail. SSDs fail. And one thing I do have to agree with the fusion haters on, is that like a RAID 0 array, fusion actually doubles your chances of having a failure causing data loss. If either physical drive fails, the whole fusion drive will fail. But not having fusion does not excuse you from having a decent backup strategy.
Awesome! Congrats on your new iMac, just wondering does it take long to wake up from sleep in the morning? I had a FD setup (returned) as it took too long to wake up from sleep / hibernate. Also where did you get yours in NZ? I can't wait for my shipment to arrive on next Monday
Cheers from Hamilton
Two points: the failure rate of any system in series is always higher than the failure rate of the individual components of the series. It's not always strictly additive (it's been 15 years since I did any engineering statistics courses!) but that's often a safe assumption. So a Fusion drive would be expected to have a higher MTBF than either an SSD or an HDD.
But... The MTBF is likely still going to be sufficiently low that I wouldn't really factor it into my decision.
But... The MTBF is likely still going to be sufficiently low that I wouldn't really factor it into my decision.
I prefer to not worry about some of my data transferring to the HDD portion, and slowing down considerably as a result. I would also rather have an easily-replaceable spinner outside of the iMac than a hard-to-access one inside, and the separate external HDD works great for storing large video files for playback (which don't need to touch the SSD at all), disk images, and Time Machine backups.
These are the reasons I went with the 512 GB SSD and 3 TB external HDD storage instead of a Fusion drive. Perfectly happy with this configuration.
Edit: However, I don't hate Fusion drives. They offer advantages in simplicity and cost, and will work just fine for some people. The exception would be the new 1 TB Fusion drive, which is now only slightly better than having no SSD at all (and they still didn't include it as standard on the base model).
These are the reasons I went with the 512 GB SSD and 3 TB external HDD storage instead of a Fusion drive. Perfectly happy with this configuration.
Edit: However, I don't hate Fusion drives. They offer advantages in simplicity and cost, and will work just fine for some people. The exception would be the new 1 TB Fusion drive, which is now only slightly better than having no SSD at all (and they still didn't include it as standard on the base model).
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They're probably coming from a spinner. Once you go SSD the the fusion drive is a poor compromise at best. But apple turned it into a joke by neutering the SSD size.