Review Of Fusion Drive For Mac Mini 2018

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My initial assessment of Apple's new Fusion Drive was positive, largely because it is the 1st hybrid drive with enough flash capacity to give users an SSD experience - but with much more capacity and at a much lower cost per GB.

But as more details emerged, I've changed my view. Fusion Drive will be good for casual users whose work does not involve processing dozens of GBs of data regularly.

Must read Mac mini (2018) review Up to 6-core Coffee Lake. Up to 64GB of memory. Up to 2TB of storage. All the ports. And in Space Gray. Back in 2012, Apple introduced the Fusion Drive to Macs in the Mac mini and iMac, merging the speed of a Solid State Drive (SSD) Your source for expert tips, special deals, commentary, reviews, and the latest tech news. Nuevo Mac Mini apple 2018. Mac Fusion Drive vs SSD vs HDD 5400 vs HDD 7200 - Duration. Apple Mac mini Unboxing and Review (Late 2014) - Duration: 5:50. Zollotech 132,069 views. Apple Mac Mini - 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, 16GB Memory, 1TB Fusion Drive, Intel Iris Graphics, Thunderbolt 2, HDMI port, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, Latest Mac OS (Newest Version).

But professionals in biotech, video, music, geophysical and other large data apps where availability is critical should avoid the Fusion Drive. Why?

Fusion confusion
FD is a combination of a hard drive with a 128GB SSD. The glue that holds them together is a special Mac driver that manages the movement of files between the SSD and the hard drive.

Apple's tech note says:
Fusion Drive automatically and dynamically moves frequently used files to Flash storage for quicker access, while infrequently used items move to the hard disk. As a result you'll enjoy shorter startup times, and as the system learns how you work you'll see faster application launches and quicker file access. Fusion Drive manages all this automatically in the background.

This model assumes a user who doesn't process a lot of files and whose files are small. Otherwise the bandwidth required to move files would choke the disk and the SSD capacity would be insufficient.

Users who process multi-gigabyte files regularly - musicians, video editors, scientists, artists - will find irritating starts and stops as the system is forced to move big chunks of data to accommodate new files. There is a better way.

How Seagate does hybrid
Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid algorithms take a different tack: they look for the most frequently used small files and keep them in the flash read cache. This works well because disks are good at retrieving large files, and choke on lots of small files.

Seagate marketing has been too conservative sizing the flash cache, so the SSD benefits aren't consistent for the target market. They are noticably faster, but too often revert back to standard disk performance for busy power users.

Data integrity

Fusion Drive is like Time Machine: a glitzy feature that power users turn off because it hurts performance.

But there's a better reason for power users to avoid the Fusion Drive: data integrity.

HFS+ is primitive 1980s file system tech. There's no background data scrubbing, checksums, or other modern data integrity features.

HFS+ assumes that writes gets written as intended and that whatever is read is what it intended - but due to many system-level issues that isn't a safe assumption. With FD your valuable files will get read and written a lot more - and face corruption every time.

The Storage Bits take
People who make a living on their Macs working with big files shouldn't risk letting HFS+ move their data around any more than they must. There will be corruption and you won't know it until it is too late. That makes FD a bad idea for pros.

Review Of Fusion Drive For Mac Mini 2018

2012 Mac Mini Fusion Drive

Mac

Casual users will like it: it will make their Mac snappier and hide the creakiness of the aging Mach kernel. Consumers who don't have a lot of data - and most have no idea - will find themselves operating out of the SSD almost all the time and will love it.

Review Of Fusion Drive For Mac Mini 2018 Ram

And if they lose a file or 2? Hey, stuff happens. How often will they notice?

Comments welcome, of course. Lesson learned: act in haste, repent at leisure.

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If you’re one of the many excited buyers chomping at the bit to get one of Apple’s latest-gen Retina iMacs, you might want to take a second to consider the specs on the new models. According to Apple’s website, the 1 TB Fusion Drives used in the new all-in-ones have seen a significant decrease in the amount of included flash storage.

How significant? The new drives ship with less than one-fifth of the previous flash storage.

A Fusion Drive, as most readers will likely recall, combines the cheap, vast storage of a traditional hard drive with the speed and efficiency of flash storage, with OS X automatically and intelligently moving files from the hard drive to the flash storage as needed to make those files more easily accessible.

In previous versions of the Fusion Drive, Apple has included 128 GB of flash storage—enough to store a lot of large apps and files that you use frequently. In the new iMacs with 1 TB Fusion Drives, however, that number has been cut to an insanely small 24 GB.

See for yourself on this excerpt from Apple’s iMac spec page:

Apparently Apple somehow thinks this is acceptable. Thankfully, for users who actually care about putting that flash storage to good use, there are two options that include the full 128 GB of flash. You’ll just need to spend a little extra to buy the 2 TB or 3 TB variety if you want to get that—an extra $200 or $300, respectively.

Because of this change, Apple is recommending that all machines with 32 GB of RAM be configured with the 2 TB or 3 TB Fusion Drive, or an all-flash drive (which will cost even more) for increased performance.

Review Of Fusion Drive For Mac Mini 2018 Memory

One reason for this? The image that’s used to store your computer’s memory contents when it goes to sleep would be too big to fit on the flash storage. Waking the Mac from sleep would take longer because the contents of that image would have to be read from the slow hard drive rather than the flash storage.