Apple's Fusion Drive now available on new entry-level 21.5" iMac orders

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  • Reply 61 of 125
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    winter wrote: »
    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.

    Then what would you remove from the Mac mini to keep the price the same? Don't say Apple has enough money so they can sell it just above cost.
  • Reply 62 of 125
    winterwinter Posts: 1,238member
    solipsismx wrote: »
    Then what would you remove from the Mac mini to keep the price the same? Don't say Apple has enough money so they can sell it just above cost.

    My fault, I mean as a BTO not standard. It would be asking too much to have Apple replace the 500 GB HDD with a 1 TB HDD or 1 TB Fusion and still sell it for $599.

    Here is what I mean.

    Looking at it now, you have the base mini at $599.

    There should at least be options for a 1 TB hard drive for another $100 and the 1 TB Fusion for $250 or SSD for $300. Or offer a 128 GB SSD only for $150.

    Hopefully I didn't leave anything out.
  • Reply 63 of 125
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    winter wrote: »
    My fault, I mean as a BTO not standard. It would be asking too much to have Apple replace the 500 GB HDD with a 1 TB HDD or 1 TB Fusion and still sell it for $599.
    Here is what I mean.

    Looking at it now, you have the base mini at $599.

    There should at least be options for a 1 TB hard drive for another $100 and the 1 TB Fusion for $250 or SSD for $300. Or offer a 128 GB SSD only for $150.
    Hopefully I didn't leave anything out.

    Ah, yeah it would be nice to get more BTO options on the lower end but that's how all the vendors get you to upgrade to a better machine. Sometimes it's because of limited resources so they put these desired components with the higher-end first, which is what I think has happened recently, but most of the time it's just designed to maximize profits. I can't say I'd not do that if I were in the same position. I'm just glad I'll be able to get a 27" iMac with a 3Tb Fusion Drive but with only 8GB RAM.
  • Reply 64 of 125
    winterwinter Posts: 1,238member
    If that's the case then they just need to improve the BTO options across the board. There was a 750 GB HDD option on the last base model of the Mac mini, they should have that or 1 TB. I think trying to get people to upgrade for minimal improvements actually hurts them in the long run.
  • Reply 65 of 125
    bregaladbregalad Posts: 816member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by chabig View Post


     


    No. Files get moved ALL of the time. In fact, on Windows, people routinely run defrag programs that move things all around. As users, we shouldn't have to be concerned with the location of bits. The OS handles that for us. On a single hard drive, a file is often split over multiple sectors and it's not a problem. In a fusion drive, bit can reside on multiple devices, just like they do on RAID systems (although without any redundancy). It just works. Of course, a fusion drive will lose data if a drive fails, but that's true of any drive failure unless measures are taken to protect the data. Fusion is not a substitute for backups.


     


     


     


    No. See above.


     






     


    Every time a file is moved there is a chance, albeit a very small one, that something will go wrong.


     


    Hard drive manufacturers publish unrecoverable error rates for their devices along the lines of "fewer than one in 10^14". That's extremely low, but my iTunes library contains roughly 2x10^12 bits. If I copy it to from one device with with an unrecoverable error rate of 10^14 to a second one with the same error rate then  ignoring everything else that could go wrong (power failure, Finder becomes unresponsive, error in RAM, network connection drops, etc.) there's a 4% chance of corruption during that copy. That's not an insignificant risk.


     


    Even worse is the fact that OS X file handling takes all sorts of unacceptable risks with your data. Most significantly source files are deleted BEFORE the destination files are verified. If anything goes wrong with permissions, duplicate filename handling or some signal glitch on the USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt bus or network connection, you lose BOTH copies of the file. Apple really needs some Unix gurus to fix the low level file system and mark the code off-limits to everyone else especially the Finder team.


     


    The laws of probability say a system with 2 independent drives will, on average, fail in half the time of a 1 drive system. Add all the extra wear and tear on both the SSD and hard drive caused by moving files back and forth all the time and I would be surprised to see Fusion systems last 20% as long as traditional single drive storage. Combine that with Apple file system APIs doing the actual moving and you've got a disaster waiting to happen.

  • Reply 66 of 125

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Bregalad View Post

    The laws of probability say a system with 2 independent drives will, on average, fail in half the time of a 1 drive system. Add all the extra wear and tear on both the SSD and hard drive caused by moving files back and forth all the time and I would be surprised to see Fusion systems last 20% as long as traditional single drive storage. Combine that with Apple file system APIs doing the actual moving and you've got a disaster waiting to happen.


    I just place an order for 27"  iMac with 3TB fusion drive. It's good to hear the fusion drive will last longer than traditional single drive. But why is this a disaster waiting to happen? Are you saying the fusion drive will crash?

  • Reply 67 of 125
    philboogiephilboogie Posts: 7,675member
    dtidmore wrote: »
    (post #59 here)

    Excellent post! Clear instructions and all. I personally don't need it as I installed OSX, including my home directory on my 256GB PCIe SSD but I certainly expect a lot of people using your precise instructions to configure their Mac this way. Props to you sir.
  • Reply 68 of 125


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  • Reply 69 of 125


    my buddy's mother makes $88 every hour on the internet. She has been out of work for 8 months but last month her income was $20667 just working on the internet for a few hours. Go to this web site and read more www.Great70.com

  • Reply 70 of 125
    bregalad wrote: »
    Every time a file is moved there is a chance, albeit a very small one, that something will go wrong.

    Most significantly source files are deleted BEFORE the destination files are verified.


    See now that is where my concerns with this fusion drive lie. And not much at all has been written about this. "All hail the mighty imac and everything that comes from the land if the Apple".

    Yes I am still planning to buy a 27" imac (5400 rpm seems like it would result on the last of my hairs being pulled out from the top of my head) so going to the 27" options I'm going the extra $200 for the 1g vram and letting others experience the thrill of fusion drive - i'll read all reports over the next 12 months and when I'm probably buying a pc/imac again, I'm hoping it won't be needed for another 5 years, that's when I can probably ssd it all at better pricing - who knows?

    I'm in a great position of never using ssd at home or work. IGNORANCE IS BLISS. In fact using my 6/7 year old pc takes me back to the feeling of using dial up Internet. With an amazing 1gb ram (NOT VRAM) and integrated graphics

    So the speed of the 7200rpm and 3.2 ghz cpu and 8 gb ram is going to be, let's say, a slight upgrade to what I have at the moment

    Thanks for feedback and views on the fusion from all sides of the fence
  • Reply 71 of 125


    my buddy's mother makes $88 every hour on the internet. She has been out of work for 8 months but last month her income was $20667 just working on the internet for a few hours. Go to this web site and read more www.Great70.c0m

  • Reply 72 of 125
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,479moderator
    solipsismx wrote:
    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.

    From now on, the (2013?) Seagate hybrid drive will use Intel's SRT technology, which is the same as Fusion. It says that it works independently of the OS so it will be a firmware-level implementation. The drive itself will determine which files are accessed most frequently and adjust the locations of the data internally.

    That's actually a better way to do it in some repsects because it would work like a normal drive so you wouldn't have compatibility problems with Disk utility or Bootcamp like Fusion does and it probably wouldn't have a partition limit. It will work in external enclosures too so Seagate could come out with a USB 3 or Thunderbolt bus-powered drive that is 1.5-2TB and performs like an SSD for certain tasks like copying folders of images or cloned backups.

    I thought Seagate and WD might be dead in the water but this is a really good way forward for them. If you can get by with a 256-500GB of storage, an SSD will be a better option but for laptop users who want the fast boot times and fast random writes as well as lots of storage in a single drive, it will be a good option.
  • Reply 73 of 125

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post





    From now on, the (2013?) Seagate hybrid drive will use Intel's SRT technology, which is the same as Fusion. 


    Ok, One More Time....SRT is NOT the same as Fusion.  Yes, there are some similarities but Fusion is actually part of the larger Apple Core Storage platform in OSX.  Core Storage is a logical pooled volume manager subsystem where physical devices are abstracted/consolidated into a pool of storage that can be sliced/diced as desired. All storage I/O passes thru the uniform Core Storage subsystem for logical devices assigned out of the physical pool of storage.  It is more closely matched to SUN's ZFS than INTEL's SRT.  While at the moment, Fusion is a single SSD fused to a single HDD, Core Storage has NO limitation as to how many and what types of storage devices you can put into the pool and/or fuse together.   SRT is a hardware solution tied totally to the actual HDD where as Core Storage abstracts the physical into logical and allows far more than just caching of data.  SRT is limited to 64GB, while Fusion has NO limitations on the size of the SSD.  Don't confuse the 4GB of dedicated cache that Core Storage carves out of the SSD with SRT as they are different animals.  This is not to say that SRT is not a valid technology. It will result in faster data storage response, but it provides NO ability to pool physical drives into a logical pool, nor does it abstract the physical hardware from the OS.  Core Storage is enterprise class storage technology that is far more forward looking than SRT.  SRT is INTEL's way of attempting to take the bull by the horns as MS has not been able to more storage technology forward since NTFS (and that was actually DEC technology that Dave Cutler brought over when he and his team were booted out of DEC and wound up at MS to deliver NT).  INTEL always solves issues with hardware as that is what they are, a hardware focused company.  Could we PLEASE STOP saying that Fusion is the same as SRT.  They are only as similar as a sports car is to SUV.


     


    David

  • Reply 74 of 125
    ecsecs Posts: 307member


    Given how cheap 256GB SSDs are nowadays, the only reasonable explanation I can imagine to this strong promotion of "Fusion drives" is that somebody (either Apple or a partner) has a worrying stock of 128GB SSDs and they don't know how to get rid of the stock. Other than that, I cannot find an explanation for pushing the Fusion drive this hard, considering how cheap 256GB SSDs are now, and even 512GB SSDs start to be quite affordable for low-end machines...

  • Reply 75 of 125

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Bregalad View Post


     


    Even worse is the fact that OS X file handling takes all sorts of unacceptable risks with your data. Most significantly source files are deleted BEFORE the destination files are verified. If anything goes wrong with permissions, duplicate filename handling or some signal glitch on the USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt bus or network connection, you lose BOTH copies of the file. Apple really needs some Unix gurus to fix the low level file system and mark the code off-limits to everyone else especially the Finder team.


     


     



    Please provide references to your allegation.  HFS+ is getting long in the tooth but as long as you have it configured as journaled, it first writes to the journal, then the destination, then verifies the destination write before marking the journal entry completed.  Yes, HFS+ can get permissions out of whack now and then, but there are tools to repair that and permissions will NOT result in loss of data.  As with any sufficiently advanced file system, there are maintenance routines that should be run periodically, such as repair file permissions, Alsoft's Disk Warrior to ensure that the directory structure is clean and optimized, and even an occasional defrag although HFS+ is less prone to fragmentation issues.  In almost a decade of OSX experience, personal and in the enterprise, I have never lost a file, something that I can't say for FAT/NTFS.


     


    David

  • Reply 76 of 125
    chabigchabig Posts: 641member
    ecs wrote: »
    Given how cheap 256GB SSDs are nowadays, the only reasonable explanation I can imagine to this strong promotion of "Fusion drives" is that somebody (either Apple or a partner) has a worrying stock of 128GB SSDs and they don't know how to get rid of the stock. Other than that, I cannot find an explanation for pushing the Fusion drive this hard, considering how cheap 256GB SSDs are now, and even 512GB SSDs start to be quite affordable for low-end machines...

    I think a more reasonable explanation of the fusion drive is that 3TB SSDs don't exist. It's not about how cheap small SSDs are. It's more about capacity.
  • Reply 77 of 125

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by ecs View Post


    Given how cheap 256GB SSDs are nowadays, the only reasonable explanation I can imagine to this strong promotion of "Fusion drives" is that somebody (either Apple or a partner) has a worrying stock of 128GB SSDs and they don't know how to get rid of the stock. Other than that, I cannot find an explanation for pushing the Fusion drive this hard, considering how cheap 256GB SSDs are now, and even 512GB SSDs start to be quite affordable for low-end machines...



    Fusion is NOT about unloading 128GB SSDs.  It is about delivery SSD performance AND massive data storage at an affordable price.  SSD prices have fallen but they are still at or slightly above $1/GB for your better SSD drives.  Top end, 750GB, 7200rpm 2.5" HDD's cost between 10-20 cents/GB, so the economics are still significantly better on HDD. I have almost 1TB (750GB HDD + 180GB SSD) of Fusion storage on my latest ivy bridge MBP which is something that I could NOT afford in SSD only form and the performance is virtually the same as SSD only.  Yes, I could live inside a 512GB SSD but that would leave me with little growth room and that would still cost me far more than the Fusion combo I am running personally as well as on several other macs.  HDD technology has been written off so many times during my career that I have lost count.  The most recent breakthough is a way, using existing manufacturing production lines, to create random wells of magnetic containment such that they don't interfere with each other even when made an order of magnitude smaller and closer together.  Assuming this makes it into production (Seagate has already announced plans), we will see the price/unit stored in HDD drop once again keeping it the preferred storage media for massive data.  SSD will overtake HDD for many things, but at least for the near term, massive storage is not one of them.


     


    David

  • Reply 78 of 125


    Originally Posted by chabig View Post

    I think a more reasonable explanation of the fusion drive is that 3TB SSDs don't exist. It's not about how cheap small SSDs are. It's more about capacity.


     


    I was going to say the same, but then I realized he was talking more about how FD uses 128GB SSDs instead of 256 GB ones. He's on our side—commenting more on the small size of the SSD (at the price ratio) than anything else.

  • Reply 79 of 125
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    I was going to say the same, but then I realized he was talking more about how FD uses 128GB SSDs instead of 256 GB ones. He's on our side—commenting more on the small size of the SSD (at the price ratio) than anything else.

    As you know the point of the Fusion Drive is to bridge the gap between performance and capacity. As a user of dual drives in my MBP for years and a user of the Fusion Drive since a week after it was announced I can see it does this very well.

    Using a 256GB SSD would just add a lot more cost and only 1/8th of an extra TB of storage capacity. You will not see a speed up in your file access by using a larger SSD. In fact, due to the nature of denser NAND it's possible that it could actually slow down performance depending on how the make this double capacity SSD.
  • Reply 80 of 125


    Originally Posted by SolipsismX View Post

    As you know the point of the Fusion Drive is to bridge the gap between performance and capacity. As a user of dual drives in my MBP for years and a user of the Fusion Drive since a week after it was announced I can see it does this very well.

    Using a 256GB SSD would just add a lot more cost and only 1/8th of an extra TB of storage capacity. You will not see a speed up in your file access by using a larger SSD. In fact, due to the nature of denser NAND it's possible that it could actually slow down performance depending on how the make this double capacity SSD.




    Right, right. I imagine Apple decided not to go with Seagate drives for that very reason. They would have done testing on a host of combinations and configurations, finally settling on the one that gave a large enough SSD to be meaningfully usable while not being too large as to still be prohibitively expensive.


     


    I bet there's a prototype iMac with a 1TB hard drive and a 32GB NAND chip sitting at Apple somewhere.

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