LOL i'm sure Apple feels really bad for you. Having to buy their high end product for your high end needs. Gee, why doesn't Apple start selling a workstation class system for the price of the Mini! What a rip-off!?!
Hey, be a douche all you want. Only one of us actually worked there. This is a stupid decision to slim down the system for no apparent performance gain beyond the traditional CPU.
Having to wait to buy a Mac Pro coming out some time in 2013 costs money.
Having to not even write code in OpenCL other than on the iMac which I would get the 27" just only to see dumping in an additional $5k for the Mac Pro is a waste of money.
I'd rather put that iMac money on a Tbolt Display or two.
I've been using a similar setup for years now (as some of you know). I hope this OS foundation/framework/whatever gets dissected and ported so I can use it on my 2010 MBP. It's great to have the SSD for my boor and apps and my 1TB HDD for my user partition but it would be better if it was as single seamless drive and my ~'/Library files could also be on the SSD for an even speedier system.
Oh the memories ... I agree we thought nothing of the price of drives back then. It was just so amazing not to need tape! Hey, were you ever tempted by a Cube? I saw a demo of their wavelet technology and my draw dropped then I saw the price and it dropped again. Then I went back to my suite of Media 100 stations and waited for rendering...
The Mac Mini is a useless product for my needs other than having a bottom feeder Mac for Web/Mail and publishing. Nothing for Engineering even at the entry level for OpenCL.
Too bad.
The iMac obsession with thin is ultra disappointing. I'll not touch the Nvidia garbage and their yield issues in the 28nm stamp out. The lack of commitment from Nvidia with OpenCL alone has me p/o'd enough as it is, but the garbage 512MB and up to 1GB RAM on the GPGPUs is embarrassing Apple.
You sacrifice potential performance for being ultra-thin. Looks sexy, too bad she can't reproduce.
Mac Pro is the only option left for heavy computing work.
"Too bad"? What???
"Embarrassing Apple" What???
The Mac Pro was always the only option for heavy computing work.
The Mac Mini and iMac are for consumers. Always have been.
If you were replying to me (hint, it's Quote not Reply) I think you misunderstood. In Time Machine there is a user option to select items to leave out. I was merely (and long windily perhaps) saying I hoped the new drive has a Systems Preferences setting to exclude items from being transferred to the SSD. If so I am sure Apple's new device will be mind blowing.
BTW my MBP required very little work to achieve what I did and being a 2010 model it was worth the small effort to make it way faster booting from an SSD.
For many years I did indeed have an Apple engineering department at my company and many highly qualified staff but alas these days I am semi retired so just play around for myself.
Well you are clearly way smarter than I am at posting on AppleInsider.
I still think you are wrong in thinking you can outsmart the software/firmware and do a better job of managing the SSD vs. HDD in a new iMac or Mini.
As you seem to think your modification of your MBP is the model of performance tweak, I suppose I'll share my mod as well: my older MacMini that came with a DVD drive was getting long in the tooth, so I got a couple of SSDs & an OWC mounting kit to replace the DVD & HDD drive with a the SSDs. I then RAIDed them together into a striped volume. It's pretty nice and I kept my iTunes on this setup for a while (until I replaced the Mini with a newer model). It performed well, but I knew that there were playlists I listened to often enough to be worth putting on the SSD just to save wear & tear on the HHD not to mention power consumption, but of course, with all my media living on external disks, it was impractical to move only the commonly used files to the SSD.
A 3TB Fusion drive would not just place my OS & Apps on the SSD, but also my most commonly accessed media, and anything else I might not think of that is accessed frequently, I don't know about you, but this is exactly the kind of thing that the machine should handle, not me!
On my iMac where I do my freelance graphic & phot work its doubly true. I don't want to have to manually move projects to the inactive, HDD storage as I complete them. I want the Mac to just figure out the project I've worked on everyday this week should be moved to SSD storage. In fCt, every new file should start life on the SSD & move to HDD if not accessed again soon. Then when my current project has been inactive for a time, the next active project will take its place on the SSD automagically.
it is funny that apple named it as 'fusion drive'. it looks like the first one apple made? come on. the technology is already existed before long. my laptop has the same tech. I don't understand why apple explains it differently? it's not really different. apple didn't invent it. other hard driver makers created it. don't make a bullshit, apple.
it is funny that apple named it as 'fusion drive'. it looks like the first one apple made? come on. the technology is already existed before long. my laptop has the same tech. I don't understand why apple explains it differently? it's not really different. apple didn't invent it. other hard driver makers created it. don't make a bullshit, apple.
I've never seen a laptop with this tech. I've only seen it on servers, never on laptops and never for a consumer device.
But let's say it already exists on your notebook, where does it exist for OS X that Apple didn't create their own low-level OS service that will monitor which apps and files are accessed most and put them on the SSD instead of the HDD so they can accessed faster?
PS: I sure hope you don't think this is the same as Intel's Turbo Memory.
You don't seem to understand subsidized pricing compared to base and cto configurations. There is a higher markup for customization at time of sale when purchasing a new machine. You see this as subsidized as opposed to not paying the cost of configured to order.
You're trolling. If you need a thorough analysis, yes, I've made a mistake. The mistake was my conclusion was elaborated
without actually having seen any details of Apple's pricing, just having heard their "price starts from..." advertisements,
having spoken about well reputed SSD storage brands,
having operated slightly outdated recollections of SSD pricing.
Now we know it all. No, Apple has no intention to subsidize this component to Mac buyers. Cheap Samsung's junk costs now $80 while Apple's charging $250. That's it.
Quote:
It's not a new concept. Seagate did something like this with their drives on a conceptual level where the NAND was used as a cache. I'm not sure how much of this was custom work, but they definitely had reference material available. It's still cool. I'll be watching these displays. I want to see how much they've improved.
You're trolling.
Yes, little trollie, as I wrote above I've installed a good dozen of Seagate's Momentus XT drives in Macs around me and I'm aware of the Seagate's concept.
Yes, there's quite interesting link between Apple's implementation and what Seagate (and Samsung) did before. But I'd wager you can not figure it out even if you read the AnandTech's account of the situation: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6406/understanding-apples-fusion-drive
On the other hand, Apple's concept is closer to auto-tiering and even, if I can put it like that, to network balancing, than to Seagate's "something like this"; everyone says, there's more advanced relocation and storage management in the game, than simple measuring the sector access frequency.
Here ends feeding you. Don't bother to write your comments citing mine. Don't expect me answering, read the AnandTech's article instead, this will benefit both of us.
Apple creates a 4GB write buffer on the NAND itself. Any writes that come in to the array hit this 4GB buffer first, which acts as sort of a write cache. Any additional writes cause the buffer to spill over to the hard disk.
Methinks Apple's borrowed a controller or its microcode from Seagate or even from their worst enemy, Samsung.
I was just thinking it's OS software writing across drives to copy files in and out like with the sleep image for RAM.
OS with its massive data relocation will step in later and will operate on the HDD and on (128-4)GB of NAND Flash storage. But as AnandTech explains, the process of writing data to the drive is absolutely identical to the one that we see within existing hybrid drives, just a bit weirder: data from 4GB buffer are written onto HDD, not even in their mother Flash storage. Then, having 128GB of NAND Flash at hand, you can allow yourself a crazy extravagance of 8,16,32 GB of cache. Apple however sticks to 4GB, which we find in cheap existing hybrid drives. They therefore might have taken the controller as is and put it in.
it is funny that apple named it as 'fusion drive'. it looks like the first one apple made? come on. the technology is already existed before long. my laptop has the same tech. I don't understand why apple explains it differently? it's not really different. apple didn't invent it. other hard driver makers created it. don't make a bullshit, apple.
Your laptop does NOT have the same tech. You think that because you don't understand the tech that's in your laptop, or what Apple just announced.
As the article I linked to earlier from ArsTechnica points out, this tech is currently only being used in enterprise, in large systems. No one else has adapted it to individual user computing before.
Methinks Apple's borrowed a controller or its microcode from Seagate or even from their worst enemy, Samsung. :err:
The article states that its the same Toshiba or Samsung drives used in their MacBooks and MB Pro's. But that's not the main feature here. The 4GB cache is just the starting point.
The big deal here is the learning mechanism which actually switches software from the HDD to the SSD, or the other way around, depending on the usage model.
This is very different from the way other computers use a cache drive.
OS with its massive data relocation will step in later and will operate on the HDD and on (128-4)GB of NAND Flash storage. But as AnandTech explains, the process of writing data to the drive is absolutely identical to the one that we see within existing hybrid drives, just a bit weirder: data from 4GB buffer are written onto HDD, not even in their mother Flash storage. Then, having 128GB of NAND Flash at hand, you can allow yourself a crazy extravagance of 8,16,32 GB of cache. Apple however sticks to 4GB, which we find in cheap existing hybrid drives. They therefore might have taken the controller as is and put it in.
I don't think you're getting this. It's safer to unload the cache to the HDD. In addition, you don't waste writes and erasures on the flash unnecessarily. The 128 GB flash is not intended for that kind of cache. That's not what this is doing. That flash is being used for programs, and some large files, as well as the OS. In order to not use the HDD as virtual memory forRAM, as usual, slowing things up all around, the flash is used for that. This is more complex then you're giving it credit for being.
Seagate claims to have a hard drive that does what Apple's Fusion Drive says, so maybe he does and Apple is using those drives.
No they don't, and they are not claiming that. If you read both articles, the one from ArsTechnica, and the new one from AnandTech, you would see that.
Seagate claims to have a hard drive that does what Apple's Fusion Drive says, so maybe he does and Apple is using those drives.
The Seagate Momentus XT is a hybrid drive in a single chassis, and it didn't really pan out because it uses a turd of a caching algorithm. It's not even smart enough to lock OS and apps to the flash. The Apple technology is two separate drives in a layered cache arrangement, and it sounds like it's smart enough to keep OS and apps on the SSD, and intelligently tracking and deciding whether a data file is used enough to merit being on the SSD.
Sounds just about like what Apple's doing. Not to speak on the quality of the drive itself, of course. I've never used one and I personally refuse to trust Seagate for anything anymore.
No they don't, and they are not claiming that. If you read both articles, the one from ArsTechnica, and the new one from AnandTech, you would see that.
I've read the arstechnica and anandtech articles, and I still don't see any significant technical advantages this has over a caching solution like Intel's SRT. Honestly, I think Intel's SRT is the more elegant solution since:
1) Block level caching vs. File level should be a more efficient use of the space
2) You can specify how much of the SSD to use as cache and use the remainder as its own dedicated SSD drive
3) As a cache, everything on it is mirrored so if your SSD fails, there's no data loss and all you have to do is plug in a new SSD and let it rebuild the cache, whereas on Fusion, you lose your most often used files, and will most likely have to recover from a backup.
4) Usable with any size/brand SSD and HDD. Have an old / spare / outdated SSD lying around? throw it in as a cache!
Sounds just about like what Apple's doing. Not to speak on the quality of the drive itself, of course. I've never used one and I personally refuse to trust Seagate for anything anymore.
That says absolutely nothing, other than it does what apple is doing with the 4GB cache,and no, it's not the same, because it doesn't do anything else. It doesn't monitor your apps, and move them from flash to the HDD, or visa versa, depending on your usage patterns. thats the big thing here, and is what is used in enterprise systems. Why don't you read the articles about this before you continue to say things that are incorrect. It's interesting how many people love to claim that whatever Apple is doing has already been done, when they don't understand it. I see that with several people here.
Since the tech sites say that Apple's work here is different, and likely they know more than posters here who don't agree, I'll go with what they are saying, as should everyone else here.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by cameronj
LOL i'm sure Apple feels really bad for you. Having to buy their high end product for your high end needs. Gee, why doesn't Apple start selling a workstation class system for the price of the Mini! What a rip-off!?!
Hey, be a douche all you want. Only one of us actually worked there. This is a stupid decision to slim down the system for no apparent performance gain beyond the traditional CPU.
Having to wait to buy a Mac Pro coming out some time in 2013 costs money.
Having to not even write code in OpenCL other than on the iMac which I would get the 27" just only to see dumping in an additional $5k for the Mac Pro is a waste of money.
I'd rather put that iMac money on a Tbolt Display or two.
There's tempted, and then there's tempted.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
The Mac Mini is a useless product for my needs other than having a bottom feeder Mac for Web/Mail and publishing. Nothing for Engineering even at the entry level for OpenCL.
Too bad.
The iMac obsession with thin is ultra disappointing. I'll not touch the Nvidia garbage and their yield issues in the 28nm stamp out. The lack of commitment from Nvidia with OpenCL alone has me p/o'd enough as it is, but the garbage 512MB and up to 1GB RAM on the GPGPUs is embarrassing Apple.
You sacrifice potential performance for being ultra-thin. Looks sexy, too bad she can't reproduce.
Mac Pro is the only option left for heavy computing work.
"Too bad"? What???
"Embarrassing Apple" What???
The Mac Pro was always the only option for heavy computing work.
The Mac Mini and iMac are for consumers. Always have been.
Well you are clearly way smarter than I am at posting on AppleInsider.
I still think you are wrong in thinking you can outsmart the software/firmware and do a better job of managing the SSD vs. HDD in a new iMac or Mini.
As you seem to think your modification of your MBP is the model of performance tweak, I suppose I'll share my mod as well: my older MacMini that came with a DVD drive was getting long in the tooth, so I got a couple of SSDs & an OWC mounting kit to replace the DVD & HDD drive with a the SSDs. I then RAIDed them together into a striped volume. It's pretty nice and I kept my iTunes on this setup for a while (until I replaced the Mini with a newer model). It performed well, but I knew that there were playlists I listened to often enough to be worth putting on the SSD just to save wear & tear on the HHD not to mention power consumption, but of course, with all my media living on external disks, it was impractical to move only the commonly used files to the SSD.
A 3TB Fusion drive would not just place my OS & Apps on the SSD, but also my most commonly accessed media, and anything else I might not think of that is accessed frequently, I don't know about you, but this is exactly the kind of thing that the machine should handle, not me!
On my iMac where I do my freelance graphic & phot work its doubly true. I don't want to have to manually move projects to the inactive, HDD storage as I complete them. I want the Mac to just figure out the project I've worked on everyday this week should be moved to SSD storage. In fCt, every new file should start life on the SSD & move to HDD if not accessed again soon. Then when my current project has been inactive for a time, the next active project will take its place on the SSD automagically.
I've never seen a laptop with this tech. I've only seen it on servers, never on laptops and never for a consumer device.
But let's say it already exists on your notebook, where does it exist for OS X that Apple didn't create their own low-level OS service that will monitor which apps and files are accessed most and put them on the SSD instead of the HDD so they can accessed faster?
PS: I sure hope you don't think this is the same as Intel's Turbo Memory.
edit: This just popped up. You should read it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6406/understanding-apples-fusion-drive
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
You don't seem to understand subsidized pricing compared to base and cto configurations. There is a higher markup for customization at time of sale when purchasing a new machine. You see this as subsidized as opposed to not paying the cost of configured to order.
You're trolling. If you need a thorough analysis, yes, I've made a mistake. The mistake was my conclusion was elaborated
without actually having seen any details of Apple's pricing, just having heard their "price starts from..." advertisements,
having spoken about well reputed SSD storage brands,
having operated slightly outdated recollections of SSD pricing.
Now we know it all. No, Apple has no intention to subsidize this component to Mac buyers. Cheap Samsung's junk costs now $80 while Apple's charging $250. That's it.
Quote:
It's not a new concept. Seagate did something like this with their drives on a conceptual level where the NAND was used as a cache. I'm not sure how much of this was custom work, but they definitely had reference material available. It's still cool. I'll be watching these displays. I want to see how much they've improved.
You're trolling.
Yes, little trollie, as I wrote above I've installed a good dozen of Seagate's Momentus XT drives in Macs around me and I'm aware of the Seagate's concept.
Yes, there's quite interesting link between Apple's implementation and what Seagate (and Samsung) did before. But I'd wager you can not figure it out even if you read the AnandTech's account of the situation: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6406/understanding-apples-fusion-drive
On the other hand, Apple's concept is closer to auto-tiering and even, if I can put it like that, to network balancing, than to Seagate's "something like this"; everyone says, there's more advanced relocation and storage management in the game, than simple measuring the sector access frequency.
Here ends feeding you. Don't bother to write your comments citing mine. Don't expect me answering, read the AnandTech's article instead, this will benefit both of us.
AnandTech's come up with their first understanding of what Apple's Fusion Drive is: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6406/understanding-apples-fusion-drive
They have a very interesting point:
Quote:
Apple creates a 4GB write buffer on the NAND itself. Any writes that come in to the array hit this 4GB buffer first, which acts as sort of a write cache. Any additional writes cause the buffer to spill over to the hard disk.
Methinks Apple's borrowed a controller or its microcode from Seagate or even from their worst enemy, Samsung.
I was just thinking it's OS software writing across drives to copy files in and out like with the sleep image for RAM.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
I was just thinking it's OS software writing across drives to copy files in and out like with the sleep image for RAM.
OS with its massive data relocation will step in later and will operate on the HDD and on (128-4)GB of NAND Flash storage. But as AnandTech explains, the process of writing data to the drive is absolutely identical to the one that we see within existing hybrid drives, just a bit weirder: data from 4GB buffer are written onto HDD, not even in their mother Flash storage. Then, having 128GB of NAND Flash at hand, you can allow yourself a crazy extravagance of 8,16,32 GB of cache. Apple however sticks to 4GB, which we find in cheap existing hybrid drives. They therefore might have taken the controller as is and put it in.
Your laptop does NOT have the same tech. You think that because you don't understand the tech that's in your laptop, or what Apple just announced.
As the article I linked to earlier from ArsTechnica points out, this tech is currently only being used in enterprise, in large systems. No one else has adapted it to individual user computing before.
Originally Posted by melgross
Your laptop does NOT have the same tech. You think that because you don't understand the tech that's in your laptop, or what Apple just announced.
Seagate claims to have a hard drive that does what Apple's Fusion Drive says, so maybe he does and Apple is using those drives.
The article states that its the same Toshiba or Samsung drives used in their MacBooks and MB Pro's. But that's not the main feature here. The 4GB cache is just the starting point.
The big deal here is the learning mechanism which actually switches software from the HDD to the SSD, or the other way around, depending on the usage model.
This is very different from the way other computers use a cache drive.
I don't think you're getting this. It's safer to unload the cache to the HDD. In addition, you don't waste writes and erasures on the flash unnecessarily. The 128 GB flash is not intended for that kind of cache. That's not what this is doing. That flash is being used for programs, and some large files, as well as the OS. In order to not use the HDD as virtual memory forRAM, as usual, slowing things up all around, the flash is used for that. This is more complex then you're giving it credit for being.
No they don't, and they are not claiming that. If you read both articles, the one from ArsTechnica, and the new one from AnandTech, you would see that.
The Seagate Momentus XT is a hybrid drive in a single chassis, and it didn't really pan out because it uses a turd of a caching algorithm. It's not even smart enough to lock OS and apps to the flash. The Apple technology is two separate drives in a layered cache arrangement, and it sounds like it's smart enough to keep OS and apps on the SSD, and intelligently tracking and deciding whether a data file is used enough to merit being on the SSD.
Originally Posted by melgross
No they don't, and they are not claiming that.
Really?
Sounds just about like what Apple's doing. Not to speak on the quality of the drive itself, of course. I've never used one and I personally refuse to trust Seagate for anything anymore.
I've read the arstechnica and anandtech articles, and I still don't see any significant technical advantages this has over a caching solution like Intel's SRT. Honestly, I think Intel's SRT is the more elegant solution since:
1) Block level caching vs. File level should be a more efficient use of the space
2) You can specify how much of the SSD to use as cache and use the remainder as its own dedicated SSD drive
3) As a cache, everything on it is mirrored so if your SSD fails, there's no data loss and all you have to do is plug in a new SSD and let it rebuild the cache, whereas on Fusion, you lose your most often used files, and will most likely have to recover from a backup.
4) Usable with any size/brand SSD and HDD. Have an old / spare / outdated SSD lying around? throw it in as a cache!
That says absolutely nothing, other than it does what apple is doing with the 4GB cache,and no, it's not the same, because it doesn't do anything else. It doesn't monitor your apps, and move them from flash to the HDD, or visa versa, depending on your usage patterns. thats the big thing here, and is what is used in enterprise systems. Why don't you read the articles about this before you continue to say things that are incorrect. It's interesting how many people love to claim that whatever Apple is doing has already been done, when they don't understand it. I see that with several people here.
Since the tech sites say that Apple's work here is different, and likely they know more than posters here who don't agree, I'll go with what they are saying, as should everyone else here.
Apple also posted a tech page about this..