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Level 6

14,404 points

1TB Fusion vs 512GB SSD... any experience?

I'm getting ready to order a new iMac to replace my 8,1 2008 model. I'm trying to decide what would be the best option as far as storage goes. My current iMac came with a 320 GB hard drive and I have managed to only use about 165GB so the amount of space is secondary. What I'm asking is for anyone who has the 1TB Fusion drvie or the 512 SSD to comment on performance and reliability. I realize the SSD would be the fastest option but the Fusion drive may be a more cost effective choice.

Wating to here from anyone who has either of these drives.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5), iPad 2 iOS (7.0.2)

Posted on Oct 19, 2013 10:26 AM

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Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Posted on Oct 19, 2013 10:31 AM

The SSD alone will be much faster than a Fusion Drive whenever the Fusion Drive must access the HDD. Otherwise, you would be comparing two SSDs. In general SSDs are more reliable than HDDs because they have no moving parts. On the other hand if a memory chip goes bad in an SSD, then the SSD is useless. But this same thing applies to the SSD of a Fusion Drive.

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46 replies

Jul 7, 2016 11:39 PM in response to lkrupp

The fusion drive is extremely slow. I am support level 1 at an University and recently we bought 15 iMacs with 1TB Fusion Drive and all of them the HD performance is very bad.

A fusion drive in reality is two different drives, put together as one. One part is a flash storage drive (SSD) and one part a regular HD. The smaller part is the fusion drive, that acts as a temporal storage for opening applications, save versions, etc. The largest part, the normal HD acts as the long term storage. The negotiation of what kind of data should be used in either drive is done by the Fusion drive board. Is rather complicated the process and no one can really tell you the tech specs of it.

As soon you install programs like Microsoft 2016 and Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat etc. The Fusion Drive seems to have problems on how to negotiate with the flash part of it. You will see the spinning wheel often ! Apple should replace all Fusion drives !

1TB Fusion vs 512GB SSD... any experience?