Fusion drive plus 5400 RPM hard drive speed
I'm contemplating buying a new iMac to replace my 2010 27 inch iMac, which was the top-of-the-line model at the time and has a 7200 RPM 1TB internal hard drive. I've found that it's no longer fast enough for me at my office where I have typically 12 to 15 apps running simultaneously (yes I use them all, all day long, about half are utilities such as HoudahSpot, Text Expander etc., the remainder include Word, Excel, Parallels, Devonthink PO, Acrobat, Mail, Safari etc.
The problem is that my existing computer is slow starting up, and often at other times - it takes several minutes to boot into 10.8.3, then another 10+ minutes to initiate about 10 apps that start up automatically.
Essentially, when any drive-intensive work is taking place, I can count on a slowdown. When Dropbox and Crashplan are both working, the computer will also slow down considerably. Dropbox and Crashplan of course both involve constant reading of the internal hard drive during their backups. Apps such as MS Word which use very old code are prone to 5 to 10 second "freezes", especially when Dropbox and Crashplan are both working. To make things worse, occasionally Carbon Copy Cloner (yes I keep three separate backups)
So I'm considering a new top of the line iMac with a Fusion Drive. I know from reading various sites that the Fusion Drive itself is very fast due to the SSD part of it. That's great.
However, here is my question for which I haven't found an answer: When disk reads and writes are going on, I believe that during the rest of the time, the OS is transferring files back and forth from the Fusion Drive to the 5400 RPM hard drive. That's what I need to know about - with multiple file backups taking place at the same time as I'm working and the Fusion Drive is busy doing file transfers, can I expect the same kinds of slowdowns?
Also, regarding startup times, can I expect a significant improvement?
Thanks for everyone's input.
intel iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.10)