Fusion vs. flash drive?

If you are asking about the newest imacs there is very little that can be changed after it is ordered. On the 21.5" model nothing can be changed. On the 27" model only the ram can be changed, nothing else but the ram.

Fusion drive is a combination of both ssd, flash storage, and standard hard drive to look and act like one drive and the os decides what files go on what physical drive.

I have no idea of the difference in performance between a fusion drive system and one that only has a ssd.

Background info:

Apple’s Fusion Drive explained:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/11/achieving-fusion-with-a-service-training-do c-ars-tears-open-apples-fusion-drive/

1 no only reason for fusion is price

2. yes you can change harddisk from both a normal hd to ssd from ssd to hd from fusion to ssd from ssd to fusion from hd to fusion from fusion to hd.....

I would stick with a standard HD or get a SSD until Fusion drives are TRIED and PROVEN.

Agree unless you have multiple backups of your system. Never cared for any system that split data across two hard drives and dependent on both of them working to retrieve your data. One fails your data is gone.

Lark.Landon wrote:

I would stick with a standard HD or get a SSD until Fusion drives are TRIED and PROVEN.

I have owned an iMac with 256GB SSD and 2TB hard drive. When it failed Apple replaced it with the current model iMac which has Fusion (128GB SSD and 3TB HD). I greatly prefer the Fusion Drive.

When I had the iMac with SSD, I kept my OSX and my Apps on the SSD and I kept my Home Folder on the internal 2TB hard drive. This meant that I never used more than half the space on the SSD. But the biggest problem was that Macs really like Home Folders to be on the Boot Drive. I had large iPhoto, Aperture, iTunes, and Documents libraries that were much larger than the SSD so I needed to put them somewhere else. I decided to put the Home folder (my User Folder) on the HD. This creates a lot of problems. When the computer failed and I had to restore from backups, the stuff on the SSD comes back easily, but the stuff on the Home Folder from the HD had a lot of permissions issues which made it hard to restore from a Time Machine backup. I was finally able to restore most of it after getting through to a highly proficient level 2 expert at Apple Care. When you do put a Home Folder on a different drive, it is very important to put at least one Administrator account on the SSD so that you can boot up if the HD fails.

You can also keep a shell of your Home folder on the SSD and link individual folders such as Aperture, iTunes, etc. on the external disk. This would have made my life easier, but is still fiddly and makes things difficult if you are using iPhoto with iMovie for example.

With the Fusion Drive, everything is simple. You just put everything on the Fusion Drive and let it sort out whether it goes on the SSD or HD. Your home folder is on the same volume as your OSX. When you restore, permissions are restored. Preferences are easily restored. A lot of complexity is taken away. And the performance is very good.

In either option, you need a good backup plan.

In my case, I was backed up to a bootable clone for the SSD, and to Time Machine for both the SSD and Home Folder, and also backed up to the cloud (CrashPlan). This turned out to be important because it turned out the Time Machine was not properly backing up my Parallels virtual machines, and having it in the cloud made it possible to restore.

In my experience, Fusion is the way to go.

Appleman1958, i have a 2011 iMac 27 inch, i7 3.4mhz 256ssd 1tb HDD and its had the published problems with the video card. Apple have kindly decided to replace the whole machine, but of course I cant have the same memory configuration, so i need to decide do i take the 3tb Fusion drive or a single large SSD? I note from your exerience you have been through something similar. I LOVE the speed of the SSD, everything starts quickly... But i also have my home folder on the HDD!!!!!!! I have a timemachine back up as well.... Is the Fusions Drive as fast as the current set up i have? Would you go for 512 ssd or 3tb fusion? I dont really need 3tb, as I am only using @50gb in total currently. I just like the idea of the 256ssd as ive read the bigger drives are generally faster.

Thanks for any assistance in advance you may provide. Very confusing situation...

The 3TB Fusion is working really well for me. But if you only need 50GB on you HD and dont see any large increases in yiur future, the SSD should work for you.

thanks appleman, 50 was typo, its actually 350gb plus all my data with photos, but im thinking ill store on external hdd.

you have me worried with my time machine backup and if it has copied both existing drives. my primary concern is one of speed. i have no doubt the fusion drive is good, but im trying to futureproof as much as posssible, so assuming ssd is way to go, i can always get thunderbold ssd later to add speed, when the price comes down of course.

@bishopharold

Sorry to be off-topic, I have the same iMac (Mid 2011) and the problem with the graphic card and/or screen. How did you get Apple to replace the whole computer? Did you have Applecare?

Hi, I didn't getting hem to replace it, they eventually offered too under AppleCare policy. It wasn't my preference to get a new machine, as I loved the solid feel of the 2011 model, and the dual drive setup was perfect for my situation. Apple simply got sick of fixing it, they replaced 2 video cards, one mainboard, and then they gave up and replaced it. It's standard policy I'd have thought. But it took 3 months of stuffing around, and they had the machine for 3 weeks at one point trying to fix and test it. I have to say, ALWAYS get AppleCare, it's a bargain. Good luck with your issue, even if you don't have AppleCare, I believe they will swap the video card on this machine as it's a recall. So call them ASAP as I think there is a time limit.

I have the same iMac you replaced. I did the "home folder on HDD via symlink" trick you did for about a month before giving up in exasperation. I don't know how you made it for over 2 years. I'm not surprised you had lots of problems; you were just asking for it. All's well that ends well, though.

Personally, I just put my less-frequently accessed apps on external drives, which I find to be faster than the dog-slow 2TB internal Toshiba on the '011. Now that I have a 1TB Thunderbolt SSD (thanks to Crucial's extremely competitive SSD pricing and Buffalo's MiniStation), even that compromise is gone.

Since I don't use the 2TB internal for anything but backup—and an internal backup is kind of silly—I'm leaning toward using Apple's Fusion software to create a Fusion drive out of the boot SSD and internal 2TB HDD. I'm given to understand that it's 100% the same thing as buying a Fusion drive. There will be a slight (maybe 5%) performance hit, but that should be more than made up for by the jostling I do (copying files, using Carbon Copy Cloner, etc.) being replaced by automatic, realtime actions.

I just had my iMac's screen replaced, and a few minor items tweaked, as a final (and initial!) servicing under AppleCare. (The screen appeared only to have some stubborn dust on it, but the Genius insisted on replacing it.) The machine is still plenty fast for my needs, as planned. So, short of selling it, what would you do? Would you do the Fusion-via-software thing?

My late 2009 imac 27" HD just crashed so I just upgraded to a Toshiba 500GB SSD (replaced the Optical Drive). Also replaced the bad HD with a seagate 2TB. I keep the the OS and application on the SSD and user files on 2TB HD. It's smoking fast. Mac boots up within 15 secs and applications load almost instantly. No issues with accessing files on the HD. Mac Techie suggested a fusion drive option, but I opted to keep it separate for now. I can "fuse" the drives later if I want. He stated that it may not be as efficient operating this way, but data recovery would be much easier. I've not noticed in appreciable difference in efficiencies. Maybe a benchmark test might show a litte ineffeciecny, but real world ops is not perceptible.