Try editing some photos from last year in Photos and you’ll likely be working entirely on the slow hard drive.Īlso, Apple provides the Fusion Drive as an option only for the iMac and Mac mini there’s no room it in a modern MacBook. Good as a Fusion Drive is, it will never be as fast as a pure SSD, and you’ll probably notice that most when working with older files. In essence, the Fusion Drive provides much of the speed of an SSD along with the capacity of a hard drive. The user sees just a single volume, but behind the scenes, macOS automatically and dynamically moves frequently used files-notably those used by the operating system-to the flash storage portion of the Fusion Drive for faster access while keeping infrequently used files on the hard drive.
As its name suggests, a Fusion Drive melds a hard disk drive with flash storage to provide the best of both worlds. In 2012, Apple came up with a compromise: the Fusion Drive. But chips are more expensive than hard disk platters and read/write heads, so the $250–$300 that will get you an 8 TB hard drive is enough for only a 1 TB SSD. Because SSDs rely on flash storage, a type of non-volatile memory whose chips retain data without power, they’re lightning fast. However, they’re relatively slow.įor speed, you want a solid-state drive, also known as an SSD. For the lowest cost per gigabyte, you can’t go wrong with a hard drive, and they come in truly massive sizes-up to a whopping 8 terabytes. That’s perfect for lighter desktop users, he said, while high-performance users who create a lot of content may still find that some tasks move to the slower drive.There are two basic types of storage devices available today: hard disk drives and solid-state drives. This is particularly annoying, he said, while people are multitasking and creating small bits of content - e-mails or notes, for example - that get tasked to the slower drive. Traditional hybrid drives that mix these kinds of storage would, for example, give you fast access to viewing something like a photo gallery, but would switch to the slower speeds when you save a file or export a photo. Shimpi said that’s a smart move on Apple’s part, because most hybrid drives will “fall apart” when they store the things users consume in flash storage but don’t automatically bring that power when users are producing, or writing, content.
#What is mac fusion drive install#
As you install new applications, if software determines that you’re not using things, it will move it over.”Īpple is also portioning off part of the flash memory - around 4GB - reserved to process the actions users are doing at any given moment, such as editing photos, reading e-mails or writing a document. “The and all applications that Apple pre-loads onto the computers are stored to the flash side. “No one’s done something like this before, at least not at this level,” he said. There are hybrid drives out there, but it’s difficult for consumers to figure out what they should be putting on the high-speed drives and what they should leave to the slower storage.Īpple’s solution, Shimpi said, takes care of that consumer confusion by moving files and programs between the two drives based on what people actually use.
“You can’t get a consumer drive that’s 1TB or 3TB of flash - you would be talking about thousands of dollars for a single drive,” he said. But when it comes to desktops, he said, decreasing the amount of storage isn’t an option. Laptops often have flash storage, and consumers are used to trading speed and stability for capacity. The drive couples a 128 GB flash drive with a 1 TB or 3TB hard drive.įlash storage, Shimpi said, offers reliability and speed benefits, but it’s very expensive. It can be hard to get excited about hard drives and storage when there are new devices to research, but Anand Shimpi of AnandTech told The Washington Post that the change could have a real, positive impact for consumers.Īs Apple explains, the storage option aims to merge the fast performance of flash memory with a more affordable, traditional hard drive technology. In the whirlwind of Apple upgrades announced Tuesday, company executive Phil Schiller sped through an explanation of the “Fusion Drive” - a hybrid hard drive that Apple has suggested as an option for its Mac mini and new iMac.
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