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Level 1

59 points

Mac Mini Drive Replacement Option(s)

Hi:

I've got a customer with a Mid 2010 Mac Mini and he was having problems with it. I ran Scannerz on it to analyze it because I suspected either the logic board or the drive, and it's the drive. He has a 1TB 2.5" in it, and I suggested that we pull the optical from it and create a Fusion drive for him. He said "No" because he uses the optical too much and doesn't want to deal with any external peripherals except his backup drive. I suggested SSDs but for the types of storage needs he has they're too expensive. Finally I came across this Western Digital hybrid that has a 120GB SSD coupled with a 1TB hard drive:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1190#Tab3

Anyone out there use one of these things yet? Are they reliable? How do they compare with an SSD standalone (that question is more for my own curiosity)? With a 120GB SSD on it I would think it would behave for the most part almost like an SSD most of the time. Another option is one of the newer Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM drives since they're supposed to be a lot faster than the older style drives, and it would certainly be a lot cheaper, but in spite of their speed increases compared to older drives, they still don't come close to an SSD.

All opinions are welcome,

Thanks.

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Sep 4, 2015 1:08 AM

59 replies

Oct 8, 2015 11:03 AM in response to ThomasB2010

Fusion drives may not be dead, but 5400 RPM drives ought to be. The newer 7200 RPM drives with AF format are probably at least twice as fast as them.

dwb

Level 7

32,944 points

Oct 8, 2015 11:24 AM in response to R.K.Orion

That may be so but neither the 21.5” iMac nor the mini offers a 7200 RPM drive option so its a moot point. Given that these drives are dead slow and that the likely reason Apple uses them is their low thermal load, Fusion or SSD are the only viable solution. Even if Apple offered SSDs larger than 512GB in these machines, the price for 1TB and larger SSDs is quite high so the Fusion becomes a viable solution.

Oct 9, 2015 2:38 AM in response to dwb

Oddly, in my opinion, Fusion drives seem to be somewhat contentious with some people on this web site. I know they're not as fast as pure SSDs but I don't see them as a failure either. RAID units have a lot of variations that can effect performance as well.

Oct 12, 2015 11:29 AM in response to ThomasB2010

As long as people need a lot of storage space then hard drives and Fusion drives will still be around. When you can get a 500GB SSD for 50 bucks, then the HDD will be gone, at least in mainstream computers. Personally, I don't see that happening any time soon.

Oct 12, 2015 3:46 PM in response to MrJavaDeveloper

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.

MrJavaDeveloper, I give that a strong second. The last Seagate I had died in 7months. Seagate acted like it was my fault that it died. Seriously, what can you do to kill a drive short of shooting it or running it over with a car?

Oct 13, 2015 11:49 AM in response to kmsimpson2000

Seagate seems to be having some quality problems. I bought an external from them about two years ago and it was clicking like crazy. I returned it.

Oct 21, 2015 11:06 AM in response to MrWilliams201

You never know which drive is made by which company any longer:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tommywilhelm/how-three-hard-drive-companies-gobbled-up-t he-indu#.rgeY4mPrV

Oct 23, 2015 11:07 AM in response to R.K.Orion

For those interested, if you're trying to find out what type and model of drive is installed in a system, one good source is iFixit.com. On another thread we were trying to figure out if a drive was one of the newer AF formatted drives with high areal density or whether it was an old style drive. I went to iFixit, found some photos and zoomed them to get the model number and then looked them up.

FYI, from what I can tell Apple is still using the older type drives. The newer types are literally almost 10 times faster in transferring data from the platter to the system (in other words, not the buffer to system speed).