Mac Mini Drive Replacement Option(s)

I did a little bit of looking at the WDs because they sound interesting. First, they cost a fortune with most listing in the vicinity of $200. The transfer/backup software is actually from some company named Acronis, a name I've heard of but I'm not familiar with the product line. Larger SSDs in the range of 250GB can be had for less than that. The WD isn't even identified as a hybrid but rather a dual drive.

It really boils down to money vs. performance. If the owner can tolerate slower speeds at a great savings I'd look at the Hitachi or WD 7200RPM drives. You can get in the vicinity of 1TB and fast speed for a hard drive for less than $80. Another idea might be putting an SSD in as the main drive and then connecting an external home-brew like the Hitachi into an external enclosure and either using it as a data/backup drive or pair it with the SSD to be Fusion. The Mini is a desktop unit so you could get away with something like that, but your customer may not like the idea of having an additional drive connected externally, or the ports may be in use. I've seen some 120GB SSDs (SandDisk, PNY to name a few) now running under $50.

You could also look at actual hybrid drives. Too many of them seem to have 5400RPM HDs in them and the flash caches are relatively small, often like 8 or 16GB. Most also seem to be Seagate and I no longer have a lot of faith in their quality.

There are lots of choices but at nearly $200 for the WD, I'd put it near the bottom of my possibilities. Needless to say these are all opinions, not facts.

I would recommend the Seagate Hybrid drives: I had a 750 GB one in my MacMini3,1 and it worked very well. Now, they have a 1 TB version.

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/laptop-solid-stat e-hybrid-drive/

No, it does not boil down to money vs performance: quality is MUCH more important.

I don't see where you got your "prices", but the prices are the same as other good disks, Hitachi, Seagate...

WD has about the same price as other good makes, they have color marking for bettering a choice for what application it is meant. Black is pro.

WD software should NOT be used at all in macs. The backup software is Acronis, indeed, but that is meant for use in Windows, it is different in that it is a "hardware" approach: copying bit/location to bit/location, not file-file. That works very good in NTFS and alike disks, but is not the way OS expects it.

A FusionDrive OS solution is to be discouraged, old hat, very difficult to control and backup, SSD is written much more than in the "normal" OS, it came about when the SSDs were still very expensive.

You've got a lot of recommendations and opinions. If it was me I'd just get one of he fast Hitachi's like I mentioned and completely skip the odd WD all together and forget about Fusion or dual drive setups. If the customer wants the OD in place then that's what he wants. The solution I offered will give him what he wants with a low cost drive and easy work. A hybrid could be a good choice too. With the savings the customer could get a backup drive too if he/she doesn't have one already.

One thing I did notice about Fusion drives, at least on Mavericks, is that when installed the OS operating overhead in memory goes up something like 300MB. I assume the OS is loading kext's or something like that to control the Fusion. Just something else to consider.

The problem of the old hat Fusion Drive is the number of writes: is much much larger, say two times.

With respect to Fusion Drives, if you ever need to access the system from an older OS, it won't be able to recognize a Fusion drive. Lion can recognize Core Storage but it won't recognize a Fusion Drive. Snow Leopard won't recognize either if memory serves me properly.

LexSchellings wrote:

The problem of the old hat Fusion Drive is the number of writes: is much much larger, say two times.

When you say "old hat Fusion" is there some other type? It kind of implies there's a newer type available. Just curious.

I am back for a few hours.

old hat: that does not imply that there is a new alternative. The DKW car is old hat, no alternative.

Fusion drive came about in the time that SSDs were very expensive. And thus was there an opportunity for a small SSD with a HDD combined. Apple (as the only one) made an operating system version that got the maximum out of that combination, by constantly supervising that the most used files were on the SSD part and the less used files on the HDD. There were numerous disadvantages to that advantage. One of the disadvantages was that the read and writes were much more than with a "simple" OS. Excessive writes make a SSD much slower and also shortens the (long) lifetime.

Since SSD are not expensive any more the need for this curious small-ssd-large-hdd combo is gone, and thus for Fusion Drive OS with all its disadvantages.

Although one disk maker brings a new combo on the market right now, but that is more to have a fast and large buffer for special applications, and no FusionDrive neccessity (it would even be counterproductive).

Hope to have answered your curiosity.

Here's another question:

Suppose you have two drives of the same type configured as a single Core Storage Volume. I've heard, but never confirmed, that in this case it's not treated like a Fusion drive but just one big volume made of two drives and the constant swapping of data between the two ceases. Is this true?

Anyone can feel free to answer but since Lex seems to know more about it than others I'm primarily directing the question at him.

Nothing is "treated as a fusion drive".

A fusion drive is the fusion drive OS that you install. If you do not install it, there is no drive "treated as a fusion drive".

A dual drive unit made of two hard drives will not be a fusion drive it will just be a logical volume comprised of two drives (or volumes). It can be checked using disk utility. The extensions used to manage Core Storage will check the speed of the drives and if one is markedly faster fusion properties will kick in. Virtual volumes spanning multiple drives are nothing new, they've been in Unix systems for decades. Fusion operations appear to be unique to Apple.

For what it's worth, I put together a Fusion made with a 64GB SSD and an older 500GB (5400 RPM) HDD. When I replaced the Fusion with one of the single Hitachi hard drives, I swear it seemed twice as fast. I didn't benchmark it or anything, but it just seemed faster.

I think the Fusion will go the way of the Dodo bird. I'd put a newer AF formatted in a system if I needed space over a Fusion any day.

Standare 21" iMac's come with a either a 500GB or 1TB 5400 RPM HDD, with the following drive options:

1TB Fusion option for $200.00

256G SSD for $200.00

512G SSD for $500

The 27" iMac and the iMac Retina's have even more options, but the HDD and Fusion options are still available.

The Mac Mini's have default configuration options of either an HDD or a Fusion drive with a host of upgrade options as well.

The Fusion isn't dead, and apparently neither are HDDs.