Fine, however it's still just another approach to the same goal. It's a gimmick, the price for SSD's have gone down significantly.
I wouldn't say it's entirely a gimmick. The Apple Fusion drive uses 4GB as a cache, which massively helps with random writes. Random write speeds are usually a small fraction of normal hard drive speeds. This is the main thing the current Seagate has in common - it uses 4-8GB of SLC memory for this purpose:
However 4-8GB is nowhere near enough to use as both a write cache and fast storage nor is it fast because it's not an SSD as such and it shows in tests:
The SSD that Apple uses has multiple NAND chips in RAID so you get very fast speeds. You can see the speed in the following test:
[VIDEO]
That's 300MB/s write and 400MB/s read - at least 3x faster than the Seagate. The Fusion drive is more like having an SSD - it's just the OS is making the decisions about what files will benefit most being on it.
I would go with the standalone SSD as you would but this is a good way of getting people to adopt SSDs and keep the prices dropping.
This technology does exit on Windows as you pointed out with Intel's SRT but Seagate has only just started using it:
I'm not sure if those drives are out yet or what the spec is. I assume they won't stick with 4-8GB so the price will go up a bit. I'd guess they'll go with 64GB.
Intel's SRT also doesn't Just Work™ when it's used on standard drives:
- you get full SSD performance for a significant amount of files unlike current hybrid drives, Fusion is 3x faster
- average users don't have to think about two separate drives unlike the separated SSD + HDD setup
- there's no difficult configuration like Intel's SRT
- users don't have to make a decision about what SSD to buy - they aren't all equal and while Apple is charging more for their SSD, they offer that convenience
I think Intel wants to get in on the hybrid drive market because Samsung and Crucial are most likely massively outselling them and their SRT is difficult to setup. However, if they go with 64GB, the price will likely go up $50-100. It's already $129.
Apple was the first to bring this technology to the mass-market. Upcoming hybrid drives will do the same and likely cost similar amounts. For the most part, SSDs alone are getting cheap enough:
BTW - Originally I didn't think you could get the fusion drive on the base model 27 inch iMac. It looks like you can order the fusion drive on the base model 27 inch now too. My question is, when will they offer a 3 TB fusion drive on the 21 inch? It seems I should be able to get a drive of that size on a 21 inch model. I understand there's less space on the back of a 21 inch iMac, but I think you should be able to find a drive like that without too much trouble.
I believe the 21.5" iMac only has room for a 2.5" drive (not sure of the maximum height allowed) but the 27" iMac has room for a 3.5" HDD which is why it can get the 3TB option.
yes I believe Fusion Drive is a trademarked name owned by Apple.
But the tech isn't totally Apple. It's a hybrid drive with much much smarter software. Anyone could have that kind of system if they wanted. Might take some rewriting and perhaps licensing a patent or two but it is possible.
I think it's entirely Apple. It's just the low level OS determining where to place files that are used more often and/or can benefit from being on the SSD. SSDs aren't better for all types of data or at least not significantly better in all cases which makes having this dual set a way to get high performance and great capacity.
I've been using this on my MBP since 2010 but without setting it up as a Fusion Drive. Once that was announced and it was shown that you can merely set up an SSD and HDD as a logical volume and it will automatically work as a Fusion Drive I gave it a shot. It's been working great ever since.
How many times do you need to be told it is not some bit of NAND on an HDD that is solely controlled by the HDD without any understanding of the OS? This is you claiming Apple uses regular glass on their devices all over again.
It's two drives. Not one drive. Not the Seagate. Seagate uses the SSD to cache the spinning disk. Apple actually uses the space on the SSD for storage. NOT the Seagate!
It's not one of the 7 RAID types but it functions like an intelligent version of RAID 0 but instead of doing half the data on each drive to balance a load and therefore increase performance without adding any redundancy Fusion Drive will intelligently determine which files will go where and when, hence the 4GB temp storage on the SSD since it's faster to write there in most cases). This makes comparing it to RAID 0 in functionality considerably more apt than simply calling it a hybrid drive. It's clearly two independent drives.
It can't be RAID 0 because RAIDs aren't intelligent and know or care about the type of data used by the user. They move the files for the fastest balance across the drives. A consumer drive likely isn't being written in a way that it becomes bottleneck, but the accessing of data quickly on an HDD is an issue just as the ability to store a lot of data cheaply on SSDs, hence the need for Fusion Drive as a great solution that pairs two drive types together.
It's certainly not RAID 1 which is called mirroring. RAID 1 is redundant. If one drive dies al the data is on the other drive. You swap in a new drive and it copies over.
I think Intel wants to get in on the hybrid drive market because Samsung and Crucial are most likely massively outselling them and their SRT is difficult to setup. However, if they go with 64GB, the price will likely go up $50-100. It's already $129.
I'm not sure if 64GB will be enough Windows users but I have been using an 80GB SSD as my boot and app drive for years and have never gone past 40GB. I think they could make it work but I don't see how the performance would be as good as Apple's Fusion Drive if it was just a hybrid-drive. They will need a service running on the OS to take full advantage or what files go on each storage type. Finally, they would have the issue of all data going through a single controller which could be a bottleneck. Fusion is writing to two separate drives, not two type of storage types on a single drive.
The best option seems to be for MS to make their own solution. I don't see anything that would prevent them from dong so as you can already create a logical drive with Windows and the specific implementation would be different due to the different goals of the OSes.
Here I thought the tech world had thoroughly explained how Fusion Drive works a month ago. Oh well.
PhilBoogie
[Microsoft] always seem late to the party, like EFI and such. Why is that? Surely there must be very talented people within the company. Are they being held back by managers who don't see the point?
Depends on the tech. EFI was slow to be implemented due to Microsoft's hardware partners, most of whom obsess about shipping the cheapest possible hardware, and generally preferred to stick with the 20+ year old BIOS mobos. Then again, Microsoft is not always beholden to their hardware partners (see PlaysForSure, Surface).
Sometimes it really is due to inter-departmental bickering and power struggles, because Microsoft is run like a country of fiefdoms competing for limited resources, and detrimentally competing within themselves due to stack ranking.
Yep, it is fun to think Apple was first though. Not sure who would want these drives but I guess it's nice to have options.
If you really don't know what you are talking about you shouldn't comment, it makes you look foolish. What Apple did with Fusion is significant because it brings enterprise level storage tiering to the desktop. I've used the hybrid drives & they're crap, the onboard SSD is way to small to be of much use at all. Because the SSD in Fusion can be whatever size you want you simply get an SSD that is big enough for your workload. You should only loose a little bit of SSD drive performance where old files get transitioned off for long term storage. This is why using a 5400rpm drive isn't a big deal, it's just your data dump. The hybrid in contrast is a fixed small SSD barely big enough to handle even your daily data needs. If you do something like video editing it can actually cause performance issues. All data on the SSD is also simultaneously written to the primary drive to save time when data needs to be archived to make room on the SSD. This causes excessive drive activity so battery life and heat can be an issue. For video editing with HD hybrids are not necessarily any faster & may in fact become slow as data is constantly moved around. A hybrid drive will see minimal performance gains over a standard drive in normal use seeing its best performance in situations with mostly reads of the same data such as 3D game play. In contrast fusion achieves near SSD speeds across the board in all applications.
Oh my fault, I didn't look to see if it was offered on the server.
I just mean for the size you're wanting. A 1TB Fusion Drive would be possible in the Mac Mini without change, since Apple uses 1TB 2.5" drives already.
They are similar in some aspects but differ radically in implementation. The Intel SRT is a much lower level implementation working at the LBA level where the Fusion drive operates at a logically higher level with knowledge of applications and files. Likewise, SRT maxes out with a 64GB cache where the Fusion Drive is a 128 GB supplement. So in the Intel case, the 64GB SDD does not augment your total storage (hence the name cache) where the Fusion drive does.
There are advantage to each but the Apple solution is a bit more elegant and has more potential for improved performance especially on write.
Both are fundamentally software solution where one is OS level (Fusion Drive) and the other BIOS level (SRT. Yes BIOS is still software).
This argument over Fusion vs the various hybrid drives was thoroughly hashed over, several months ago. Fusion is NOT the same as a hybrid drive which uses a small amount of onboard FLASH NAND to cache read/writes to the rotating portion of the drive. Fusion is not the same as the INTEL SRT. Fusion is NOT RAID.
Fusion is a systems level tiered storage subsystem (again, this is NOT what any of the mentioned technologies implement). Apple's Core Storage (ie what actually allows a Fusion drive to be implemented) abstracts storage system interactions away from direct interaction with the hardware (ie all read/writes travel thru Core Storage which in turn interacts with underlying hardware). Tiered storage technology is from the enterprise side of computing where it has been used for many years. All writes (Core Storage Blocks) initially go against a 4GB cache maintained on the SSD, but then either get written to the SSD or to the HDD depending on conditions. Later, Core Storage blocks that were initially written to either SSD or HDD may be moved by Core Storage to the other. Fusion (actually Core Storage) monitors what is stored where, how often it is updated/requested and moves Core Storage "blocks" around to ensure that the things that require speed (OS for instance) reside on the SSD along with other "Core Storage identified blocks" that also require speed. It works at the block level as defined by Apple's Core Storage, NOT TO BE CONFUSED with block level on a rotating storage device. When a device, whether it is made part of a Fusion Drive or NOT is added to Core Storage, its behavior is mediated by Core Storage (File Vault uses Core Storage as well). Core Storage breaks data into its own block format and totally controls the interaction with the storage device. With Fusion, a file may very well be divided between the SSD and the rotating drive if portions of it are routinely updated while others are static. This is far more efficient than writing an entire file everytime some portion of it is updated. Yes, this is putting a lot of faith in Apple's Core Storage technology to handle all this properly and as with ANY storage device technology, BACKUPS, preferably multiples using different technologies (such as Time Machine and Super Duper) should be in place.
Is Fusion any less resilient and robust than a single rotating hard drive? Statistically it is NOT as robust as there are more links in the chain as well as two (can be more) storage devices in the loop, but in practice, it certainly seems to be rock solid. I have been running Fusion on several machines since it was discovered that it was possible to DYI and not ONE has had a single hiccup. This is not to say that tomorrow every last one of them will crash as the result of a generic Core Storage bug, but there is NOTHING in Fusion that inherently makes it less robust than a symbolically linked SSD/HDD combo where file segregation is user controlled. Just because blocks of data are being moved around behind the scenes is not something to worry about as with any journaled file system, the transactions are first journaled, then written to new location, then verified, then deleted from old location. One thing that I would advise is that using a cheap SSD as part of a Fusion drive would not be recommended as there is no question that Fusion works the SSD harder than might be typical, but again, Fusion was designed to understand SSD limitations and if a high end SSD is used, it should provide many years of service before its eventual end of life capacity degradation ensues (I use INTEL 180GB 520 series SSD drives).
FYI, Fusion is compatible with Alsoft's Disk Warrior, Super Duper sees it as ONE drive, Time Machine is happy as a lark with Fusion and Apple's Disk Utility included in 10.8.2 is Fusion aware. Also, you can target mode a Fusion drive as long as the hosting machine is running 10.8 or later code base. I ran sym-linked SSD/HDD combos for several years and Fusion is simply a better mouse trap for my time and money. If you don't trust Apple to do this correct, then why are you even running in the Apple ecosystem in the first place.
One last thing, I did physically partition my HDD drive into two partitions using Disk Utility before adding either SSD or HDD into Core Storage. One partition of 50GB for swap and hibernation files and the remainder for use by Fusion. You can partition within Core Storage, but I chose to partition the old fashioned way as I saw no advantage to having Core Storage involvement in either the swap or hibernation files. This segregation of swap and hibernation into a separate partition may not be necessary. Of course I had to make some changes in the dynamic pager plist file to point to the correct location and I used a sym-link to point the default hibernation file to the location on the dedicated HDD partition. I then used SetFile to flag the dedicated swap/hibernation partition as hidden from finder as I can alway manually check it using the "Go To Folder" feature in finder
Actually it really is, instead of caching in hardware Apple does it in software using what they call CoreStorge. It's still a Hybrid, two drives. This isn't anything new nor is it something that should be sought after in my opinion. Buy a smaller SSD for the system and larger HDD for data.
That isn't the best system. Apple's solution takes both the files from the System and data which are used the most and puts them on the SSD drive. It does this based on usage and behind the scenes. That is a superior system if you can't afford a pure SSD drive because not all system files are used frequently. For instance, if there is a particular word file you are working on frequently, it will put that on the SSD (but only the part of the file being accessed frequently (not necessarily the whole file)). It will put the system files that are not used frequently on the HDD drive.
Moreover, typical hybrid drives, like the one offered by Seagate, have a very small SSD drive at 6 GBs. This means not a lot of data will be sitting on the SSD drive. Probably mostly system files. Apple's Fusion drive combines 128 SSD with 1 to 3 TB of HHD storage so much more data can sit on the SSD.
I have a question about a Fusion Drive, almost a year ago I spilled lemon aid on my 2011 macbook pro 13" it still works with some problems but it only runs 3/4 the regular speed I used speed test to find this out, would my computer run faster if I installed a Fusion Drive in it?
Any help would be appreciated
Do like I did. Go get a SSD drive off Amazon. You can find 256 GB drives for less than $200.
One last thing, I did physically partition my HDD drive into two partitions using Disk Utility before adding either SSD or HDD into Core Storage. One partition of 50GB for swap and hibernation files and the remainder for use by Fusion. You can partition within Core Storage, but I chose to partition the old fashioned way as I saw no advantage to having Core Storage involvement in either the swap or hibernation files. This segregation of swap and hibernation into a separate partition may not be necessary. Of course I had to make some changes in the dynamic pager plist file to point to the correct location and I used a sym-link to point the default hibernation file to the location on the dedicated HDD partition. I then used SetFile to flag the dedicated swap/hibernation partition as hidden from finder as I can alway manually check it using the "Go To Folder" feature in finder
How did you achieve this? I have 8GB RAM in my MBP and my iMac will have 32GB of RAM. If I can keep that from being constantly written to on the SSD I'd like to do so, assuming the sleep image is kept on the SSD and not the HDD when using Fusion Drive.
Also, do you know how to completely disable it on ML on a new MBP that have Power Nap.
I just mean for the size you're wanting. A 1TB Fusion Drive would be possible in the Mac Mini without change, since Apple uses 1TB 2.5" drives already.
To be honest, I prefer pure solid state even though the Fusion drive is very good. I would like to think that by the time the Haswell mini is released, the $799 option will offer a single 512 GB SSD.
Edit: Maybe even have the base mini offer the 256 GB. (nah that would make sense, heh).
To be honest, I prefer pure solid state even though the Fusion drive is very good. I would like to think that by the time the Haswell mini is released, the $799 option will offer a single 512 GB SSD.
Edit: Maybe even have the base mini offer the 256 GB. (nah that would make sense, heh).
Why does that make sense? It means the base Mac mini starts at over $300 more than the current starting price of $599. I don't think starting the Mac mini at over $900 and only going up from there make any sense at all.
CoreStorage doesn't care at all what kind of drives you put in a logical volume. HDDs or SSDs in any combination and whatever size. While Apple is currently shipping configurations with 128GB SSDs plus the HDD, they can easily mix and match whatever sizes they want.
I suspect the Fusion Drive capabilities in CoreStorage even allow multiple SSDs and HDDs in the logical volume. It just knows there are SSDs within the set and uses those for whatever it flags for faster access.
While a 3GB SSD is technically superior to a Fusion based volume of the same size, the cost between the two is very different.
To be honest, I prefer pure solid state even though the Fusion drive is very good. I would like to think that by the time the Haswell mini is released, the $799 option will offer a single 512 GB SSD.
Edit: Maybe even have the base mini offer the 256 GB. (nah that would make sense, heh).
Don't hold your breath. A 512 GB SSD is $350-600 all by itself. I can't see how a Mini with 512 GB is going to sell for $799. Prices are dropping, but not that fast.
Fusion offers a nice balance. 64 GB of SSD is enough to have a huge impact on performance with only a modest cost increase.
Power Nap ONLY applies to total SSD based Retina models. I have a new ivy bridge 15" MBP and Power Nap does not even appear as an option. With 16GB of RAM in my new MBP, I really did not want that much SSD space taken by the hibernation file, thus the desire to move it to a dedicated HDD partition along with swap. I know that putting swap onto the HDD does exact a small performance penalty when paging occurs, but with large installed RAM that is an infrequent event.
First off, BEFORE you do anything related to Core Storage, make a bootable backup of your system, then boot off the backup and use the good old fashioned Disk Utility to physically partition the internal HDD into two partitions. I chose 50GB as the first partition as I wanted the swap to be on the fastest part of the drive (I named the partition, swap). The remainder (700GB) was given over to Core Storage. I also partitioned the SSD into one large partition. How you do this is to use the diskutil list command to get the partition identifiers and then use that information in the diskutil cs create command. You want to make sure that you list the SSD as the 1ST drive in the diskutil cs create command. Even though several partitions will show up under the SSD drive you can just use the overriding ID such as /dev/disk0, or whatever the SSD shows up as in diskutil list. Then for the second drive you use the SPECIFIC partition ID that you intend for Fusion usage, such as /dev/disk1s3. That way the partition that you created for swap and hibernation stays OUTSIDE of Core Storage. The rest of the Fusion DYI is the standard diskutil cs createVolume command such as
That done, restore your OS to the newly minted Fusion drive. I chose to do a clean ML install followed by a restore from other drive option (choosing my bootable backup as the source). That way I was sure that the OS installed as a clean Fusion environment unadulterated by my previous installation. Then you have to go back to the command line and do a bit more work. I used Lingon to edit my plist file, but use your favorite plist editor.
To move the swapfile, changes are made to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
These changes do two things. The first is the wait4path shell command that holds off attempting to mount the swapfile until the path is valid. This is necessary as the SSD boot drive is incredibly fast and as such on booting, the rotating drive containing the swapfile needs to be given time to come online. The second part of the changes points OSX to the NEW location of the swapfile, /Volumes/swap
Then you can delete the swap file completely from the default /private/var/vm directory. Reboot and verify that a new swapfile was NOT rewritten to the old default location but rather to /Volumes/swap.
To get hibernation moved to the dedicated HDD partition, just copy the existing hibernation file in /private/var/vm over to the dedicated swap partition then delete it from /private/var/vm. Then use the following to create the sym-link between the default location and the dedicated HDD partition.
Finally, you may want to hide the swap partition so that it does not appear in finder. To do this you will need the developer command line package that comes with XCode. This does NOT install automatically with XCode, you have to do it once XCode is installed from within XCode itself.
Why does that make sense? It means the base Mac mini starts at over $300 more than the current starting price of $599. I don't think starting the Mac mini at over $900 and only going up from there make any sense at all.
I mean have the $599 Mac mini and at least offer either the 1 TB Fusion Drive as with the base model iMac or the 256 GB SSD.
Don't hold your breath. A 512 GB SSD is $350-600 all by itself. I can't see how a Mini with 512 GB is going to sell for $799. Prices are dropping, but not that fast.
Fusion offers a nice balance. 64 GB of SSD is enough to have a huge impact on performance with only a modest cost increase.
I mean have the option of a 512 GB for whatever Apple chooses to sell it for.
Maybe Apple doesn't believes in very limited choices for the customer. I believe in having many options.
Why does that make sense? It means the base Mac mini starts at over $300 more than the current starting price of $599. I don't think starting the Mac mini at over $900 and only going up from there make any sense at all.
I mean have the $599 Mac mini and at least offer either the 1 TB Fusion Drive as with the base model iMac or the 256 GB SSD.
Don't hold your breath. A 512 GB SSD is $350-600 all by itself. I can't see how a Mini with 512 GB is going to sell for $799. Prices are dropping, but not that fast.
Fusion offers a nice balance. 64 GB of SSD is enough to have a huge impact on performance with only a modest cost increase.
I mean have the option of a 512 GB for whatever Apple chooses to sell it for.
Comments
I wouldn't say it's entirely a gimmick. The Apple Fusion drive uses 4GB as a cache, which massively helps with random writes. Random write speeds are usually a small fraction of normal hard drive speeds. This is the main thing the current Seagate has in common - it uses 4-8GB of SLC memory for this purpose:
http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/momentus-xt-data-sheet-ds1704-4-1209-us.pdf
However 4-8GB is nowhere near enough to use as both a write cache and fast storage nor is it fast because it's not an SSD as such and it shows in tests:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223-3.html
The SSD that Apple uses has multiple NAND chips in RAID so you get very fast speeds. You can see the speed in the following test:
[VIDEO]
That's 300MB/s write and 400MB/s read - at least 3x faster than the Seagate. The Fusion drive is more like having an SSD - it's just the OS is making the decisions about what files will benefit most being on it.
I would go with the standalone SSD as you would but this is a good way of getting people to adopt SSDs and keep the prices dropping.
This technology does exit on Windows as you pointed out with Intel's SRT but Seagate has only just started using it:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20120911205703_Seagate_Optimizes_Next_Generation_Hybrid_Hard_Drive_for_Intel_s_Smart_Response_Technology.html
I'm not sure if those drives are out yet or what the spec is. I assume they won't stick with 4-8GB so the price will go up a bit. I'd guess they'll go with 64GB.
Intel's SRT also doesn't Just Work™ when it's used on standard drives:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/248828/how_to_setup_intel_smart_response_ssd_caching_technology.html
The benefits of Fusion are:
- you get full SSD performance for a significant amount of files unlike current hybrid drives, Fusion is 3x faster
- average users don't have to think about two separate drives unlike the separated SSD + HDD setup
- there's no difficult configuration like Intel's SRT
- users don't have to make a decision about what SSD to buy - they aren't all equal and while Apple is charging more for their SSD, they offer that convenience
I think Intel wants to get in on the hybrid drive market because Samsung and Crucial are most likely massively outselling them and their SRT is difficult to setup. However, if they go with 64GB, the price will likely go up $50-100. It's already $129.
Apple was the first to bring this technology to the mass-market. Upcoming hybrid drives will do the same and likely cost similar amounts. For the most part, SSDs alone are getting cheap enough:
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-sata_6_0_gb-2-5-Inch-MZ-7TD500BW/dp/B009NHAF3I
I don't see multi-TB SSDs being cheap though so the Fusion drive will have that advantage for a while.
I believe the 21.5" iMac only has room for a 2.5" drive (not sure of the maximum height allowed) but the 27" iMac has room for a 3.5" HDD which is why it can get the 3TB option.
I think it's entirely Apple. It's just the low level OS determining where to place files that are used more often and/or can benefit from being on the SSD. SSDs aren't better for all types of data or at least not significantly better in all cases which makes having this dual set a way to get high performance and great capacity.
I've been using this on my MBP since 2010 but without setting it up as a Fusion Drive. Once that was announced and it was shown that you can merely set up an SSD and HDD as a logical volume and it will automatically work as a Fusion Drive I gave it a shot. It's been working great ever since.
How many times do you need to be told it is not some bit of NAND on an HDD that is solely controlled by the HDD without any understanding of the OS? This is you claiming Apple uses regular glass on their devices all over again.
It's not one of the 7 RAID types but it functions like an intelligent version of RAID 0 but instead of doing half the data on each drive to balance a load and therefore increase performance without adding any redundancy Fusion Drive will intelligently determine which files will go where and when, hence the 4GB temp storage on the SSD since it's faster to write there in most cases). This makes comparing it to RAID 0 in functionality considerably more apt than simply calling it a hybrid drive. It's clearly two independent drives.
It can't be RAID 0 because RAIDs aren't intelligent and know or care about the type of data used by the user. They move the files for the fastest balance across the drives. A consumer drive likely isn't being written in a way that it becomes bottleneck, but the accessing of data quickly on an HDD is an issue just as the ability to store a lot of data cheaply on SSDs, hence the need for Fusion Drive as a great solution that pairs two drive types together.
It's certainly not RAID 1 which is called mirroring. RAID 1 is redundant. If one drive dies al the data is on the other drive. You swap in a new drive and it copies over.
I'm not sure if 64GB will be enough Windows users but I have been using an 80GB SSD as my boot and app drive for years and have never gone past 40GB. I think they could make it work but I don't see how the performance would be as good as Apple's Fusion Drive if it was just a hybrid-drive. They will need a service running on the OS to take full advantage or what files go on each storage type. Finally, they would have the issue of all data going through a single controller which could be a bottleneck. Fusion is writing to two separate drives, not two type of storage types on a single drive.
The best option seems to be for MS to make their own solution. I don't see anything that would prevent them from dong so as you can already create a logical drive with Windows and the specific implementation would be different due to the different goals of the OSes.
It's a floor wax!
It's a dessert topping!
Here I thought the tech world had thoroughly explained how Fusion Drive works a month ago. Oh well.
PhilBoogie
[Microsoft] always seem late to the party, like EFI and such. Why is that? Surely there must be very talented people within the company. Are they being held back by managers who don't see the point?
Depends on the tech. EFI was slow to be implemented due to Microsoft's hardware partners, most of whom obsess about shipping the cheapest possible hardware, and generally preferred to stick with the 20+ year old BIOS mobos. Then again, Microsoft is not always beholden to their hardware partners (see PlaysForSure, Surface).
Sometimes it really is due to inter-departmental bickering and power struggles, because Microsoft is run like a country of fiefdoms competing for limited resources, and detrimentally competing within themselves due to stack ranking.
If you really don't know what you are talking about you shouldn't comment, it makes you look foolish. What Apple did with Fusion is significant because it brings enterprise level storage tiering to the desktop. I've used the hybrid drives & they're crap, the onboard SSD is way to small to be of much use at all. Because the SSD in Fusion can be whatever size you want you simply get an SSD that is big enough for your workload. You should only loose a little bit of SSD drive performance where old files get transitioned off for long term storage. This is why using a 5400rpm drive isn't a big deal, it's just your data dump. The hybrid in contrast is a fixed small SSD barely big enough to handle even your daily data needs. If you do something like video editing it can actually cause performance issues. All data on the SSD is also simultaneously written to the primary drive to save time when data needs to be archived to make room on the SSD. This causes excessive drive activity so battery life and heat can be an issue. For video editing with HD hybrids are not necessarily any faster & may in fact become slow as data is constantly moved around. A hybrid drive will see minimal performance gains over a standard drive in normal use seeing its best performance in situations with mostly reads of the same data such as 3D game play. In contrast fusion achieves near SSD speeds across the board in all applications.
Oh my fault, I didn't look to see if it was offered on the server.
Originally Posted by Winter
Oh my fault, I didn't look to see if it was offered on the server.
I just mean for the size you're wanting. A 1TB Fusion Drive would be possible in the Mac Mini without change, since Apple uses 1TB 2.5" drives already.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Relic
Actually the Seagate is identical to the Fusion drive. The tech is from Intel -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Response_Technology
Ahhh... No.
They are similar in some aspects but differ radically in implementation. The Intel SRT is a much lower level implementation working at the LBA level where the Fusion drive operates at a logically higher level with knowledge of applications and files. Likewise, SRT maxes out with a 64GB cache where the Fusion Drive is a 128 GB supplement. So in the Intel case, the 64GB SDD does not augment your total storage (hence the name cache) where the Fusion drive does.
There are advantage to each but the Apple solution is a bit more elegant and has more potential for improved performance especially on write.
Both are fundamentally software solution where one is OS level (Fusion Drive) and the other BIOS level (SRT. Yes BIOS is still software).
This argument over Fusion vs the various hybrid drives was thoroughly hashed over, several months ago. Fusion is NOT the same as a hybrid drive which uses a small amount of onboard FLASH NAND to cache read/writes to the rotating portion of the drive. Fusion is not the same as the INTEL SRT. Fusion is NOT RAID.
Fusion is a systems level tiered storage subsystem (again, this is NOT what any of the mentioned technologies implement). Apple's Core Storage (ie what actually allows a Fusion drive to be implemented) abstracts storage system interactions away from direct interaction with the hardware (ie all read/writes travel thru Core Storage which in turn interacts with underlying hardware). Tiered storage technology is from the enterprise side of computing where it has been used for many years. All writes (Core Storage Blocks) initially go against a 4GB cache maintained on the SSD, but then either get written to the SSD or to the HDD depending on conditions. Later, Core Storage blocks that were initially written to either SSD or HDD may be moved by Core Storage to the other. Fusion (actually Core Storage) monitors what is stored where, how often it is updated/requested and moves Core Storage "blocks" around to ensure that the things that require speed (OS for instance) reside on the SSD along with other "Core Storage identified blocks" that also require speed. It works at the block level as defined by Apple's Core Storage, NOT TO BE CONFUSED with block level on a rotating storage device. When a device, whether it is made part of a Fusion Drive or NOT is added to Core Storage, its behavior is mediated by Core Storage (File Vault uses Core Storage as well). Core Storage breaks data into its own block format and totally controls the interaction with the storage device. With Fusion, a file may very well be divided between the SSD and the rotating drive if portions of it are routinely updated while others are static. This is far more efficient than writing an entire file everytime some portion of it is updated. Yes, this is putting a lot of faith in Apple's Core Storage technology to handle all this properly and as with ANY storage device technology, BACKUPS, preferably multiples using different technologies (such as Time Machine and Super Duper) should be in place.
Is Fusion any less resilient and robust than a single rotating hard drive? Statistically it is NOT as robust as there are more links in the chain as well as two (can be more) storage devices in the loop, but in practice, it certainly seems to be rock solid. I have been running Fusion on several machines since it was discovered that it was possible to DYI and not ONE has had a single hiccup. This is not to say that tomorrow every last one of them will crash as the result of a generic Core Storage bug, but there is NOTHING in Fusion that inherently makes it less robust than a symbolically linked SSD/HDD combo where file segregation is user controlled. Just because blocks of data are being moved around behind the scenes is not something to worry about as with any journaled file system, the transactions are first journaled, then written to new location, then verified, then deleted from old location. One thing that I would advise is that using a cheap SSD as part of a Fusion drive would not be recommended as there is no question that Fusion works the SSD harder than might be typical, but again, Fusion was designed to understand SSD limitations and if a high end SSD is used, it should provide many years of service before its eventual end of life capacity degradation ensues (I use INTEL 180GB 520 series SSD drives).
FYI, Fusion is compatible with Alsoft's Disk Warrior, Super Duper sees it as ONE drive, Time Machine is happy as a lark with Fusion and Apple's Disk Utility included in 10.8.2 is Fusion aware. Also, you can target mode a Fusion drive as long as the hosting machine is running 10.8 or later code base. I ran sym-linked SSD/HDD combos for several years and Fusion is simply a better mouse trap for my time and money. If you don't trust Apple to do this correct, then why are you even running in the Apple ecosystem in the first place.
One last thing, I did physically partition my HDD drive into two partitions using Disk Utility before adding either SSD or HDD into Core Storage. One partition of 50GB for swap and hibernation files and the remainder for use by Fusion. You can partition within Core Storage, but I chose to partition the old fashioned way as I saw no advantage to having Core Storage involvement in either the swap or hibernation files. This segregation of swap and hibernation into a separate partition may not be necessary. Of course I had to make some changes in the dynamic pager plist file to point to the correct location and I used a sym-link to point the default hibernation file to the location on the dedicated HDD partition. I then used SetFile to flag the dedicated swap/hibernation partition as hidden from finder as I can alway manually check it using the "Go To Folder" feature in finder
Quote:
Originally Posted by Relic
Actually it really is, instead of caching in hardware Apple does it in software using what they call CoreStorge. It's still a Hybrid, two drives. This isn't anything new nor is it something that should be sought after in my opinion. Buy a smaller SSD for the system and larger HDD for data.
That isn't the best system. Apple's solution takes both the files from the System and data which are used the most and puts them on the SSD drive. It does this based on usage and behind the scenes. That is a superior system if you can't afford a pure SSD drive because not all system files are used frequently. For instance, if there is a particular word file you are working on frequently, it will put that on the SSD (but only the part of the file being accessed frequently (not necessarily the whole file)). It will put the system files that are not used frequently on the HDD drive.
Moreover, typical hybrid drives, like the one offered by Seagate, have a very small SSD drive at 6 GBs. This means not a lot of data will be sitting on the SSD drive. Probably mostly system files. Apple's Fusion drive combines 128 SSD with 1 to 3 TB of HHD storage so much more data can sit on the SSD.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mwhiteco
I have a question about a Fusion Drive, almost a year ago I spilled lemon aid on my 2011 macbook pro 13" it still works with some problems but it only runs 3/4 the regular speed I used speed test to find this out, would my computer run faster if I installed a Fusion Drive in it?
Any help would be appreciated
Do like I did. Go get a SSD drive off Amazon. You can find 256 GB drives for less than $200.
How did you achieve this? I have 8GB RAM in my MBP and my iMac will have 32GB of RAM. If I can keep that from being constantly written to on the SSD I'd like to do so, assuming the sleep image is kept on the SSD and not the HDD when using Fusion Drive.
Also, do you know how to completely disable it on ML on a new MBP that have Power Nap.
To be honest, I prefer pure solid state even though the Fusion drive is very good. I would like to think that by the time the Haswell mini is released, the $799 option will offer a single 512 GB SSD.
Edit: Maybe even have the base mini offer the 256 GB. (nah that would make sense, heh).
Why does that make sense? It means the base Mac mini starts at over $300 more than the current starting price of $599. I don't think starting the Mac mini at over $900 and only going up from there make any sense at all.
I suspect the Fusion Drive capabilities in CoreStorage even allow multiple SSDs and HDDs in the logical volume. It just knows there are SSDs within the set and uses those for whatever it flags for faster access.
While a 3GB SSD is technically superior to a Fusion based volume of the same size, the cost between the two is very different.
Don't hold your breath. A 512 GB SSD is $350-600 all by itself. I can't see how a Mini with 512 GB is going to sell for $799. Prices are dropping, but not that fast.
Fusion offers a nice balance. 64 GB of SSD is enough to have a huge impact on performance with only a modest cost increase.
Power Nap ONLY applies to total SSD based Retina models. I have a new ivy bridge 15" MBP and Power Nap does not even appear as an option. With 16GB of RAM in my new MBP, I really did not want that much SSD space taken by the hibernation file, thus the desire to move it to a dedicated HDD partition along with swap. I know that putting swap onto the HDD does exact a small performance penalty when paging occurs, but with large installed RAM that is an infrequent event.
First off, BEFORE you do anything related to Core Storage, make a bootable backup of your system, then boot off the backup and use the good old fashioned Disk Utility to physically partition the internal HDD into two partitions. I chose 50GB as the first partition as I wanted the swap to be on the fastest part of the drive (I named the partition, swap). The remainder (700GB) was given over to Core Storage. I also partitioned the SSD into one large partition. How you do this is to use the diskutil list command to get the partition identifiers and then use that information in the diskutil cs create command. You want to make sure that you list the SSD as the 1ST drive in the diskutil cs create command. Even though several partitions will show up under the SSD drive you can just use the overriding ID such as /dev/disk0, or whatever the SSD shows up as in diskutil list. Then for the second drive you use the SPECIFIC partition ID that you intend for Fusion usage, such as /dev/disk1s3. That way the partition that you created for swap and hibernation stays OUTSIDE of Core Storage. The rest of the Fusion DYI is the standard diskutil cs createVolume command such as
diskutil coreStorage createVolume 50B457C3-ADC6-4EDC-9ABA-FD8C6EEDE69A jhfs+ "Macintosh HD" 100%
That done, restore your OS to the newly minted Fusion drive. I chose to do a clean ML install followed by a restore from other drive option (choosing my bootable backup as the source). That way I was sure that the OS installed as a clean Fusion environment unadulterated by my previous installation. Then you have to go back to the command line and do a bit more work. I used Lingon to edit my plist file, but use your favorite plist editor.
To move the swapfile, changes are made to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
Here is the file as originally written by Apple.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs$
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>EnableTransactions</key>
<true/>
<key>HopefullyExitsLast</key>
<true/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.apple.dynamic_pager</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/sbin/dynamic_pager</string>
<string>-F</string>
<string>/private/var/vm/swapfile</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>
Here is the file as modified.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs$
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>EnableTransactions</key>
<true/>
<key>HopefullyExitsLast</key>
<true/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.apple.dynamic_pager</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/bin/bash</string>
<string>-c</string>
<string>/bin/wait4path /Volumes/swap/ &&
/sbin/dynamic_pager -F /Volumes/swap/swapfile</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>
These changes do two things. The first is the wait4path shell command that holds off attempting to mount the swapfile until the path is valid. This is necessary as the SSD boot drive is incredibly fast and as such on booting, the rotating drive containing the swapfile needs to be given time to come online. The second part of the changes points OSX to the NEW location of the swapfile, /Volumes/swap
Then you can delete the swap file completely from the default /private/var/vm directory. Reboot and verify that a new swapfile was NOT rewritten to the old default location but rather to /Volumes/swap.
To get hibernation moved to the dedicated HDD partition, just copy the existing hibernation file in /private/var/vm over to the dedicated swap partition then delete it from /private/var/vm. Then use the following to create the sym-link between the default location and the dedicated HDD partition.
sudo ln -s /Volumes/swap/sleepimage /private/var/vm
Finally, you may want to hide the swap partition so that it does not appear in finder. To do this you will need the developer command line package that comes with XCode. This does NOT install automatically with XCode, you have to do it once XCode is installed from within XCode itself.
sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/swap Then reboot.
I mean have the $599 Mac mini and at least offer either the 1 TB Fusion Drive as with the base model iMac or the 256 GB SSD.
I mean have the option of a 512 GB for whatever Apple chooses to sell it for.
Maybe Apple doesn't believes in very limited choices for the customer. I believe in having many options.
I mean have the $599 Mac mini and at least offer either the 1 TB Fusion Drive as with the base model iMac or the 256 GB SSD.
I mean have the option of a 512 GB for whatever Apple chooses to sell it for.