One minute to learn about fusion Drive

What is Fusion drive?

Fusion Drive is Apple in the latest Mac Mini and the IMac on the use of a hard disk technology, fusion Drive if translated into Chinese, it can be called "Fusion Drive", it consists of a traditional mechanical hard disk and a flash memory chip storage of SSD solid state hard disk composition.

Fusion Drive Scheme

The Fusion drive technology was presented by Apple at its 2012/10/23 day product launch. This technology can make the performance of the hard disk close to SSD solid-state drives, but it can provide more storage space. This technology combines 128GB solid-state drives with 1TB or 3TB mechanical hard drives on one hard disk, providing faster read and write speeds and seamless integration with mountain lion systems.

How is Fusion Drive realized?

Fusion drive technology automatically put the use of low frequency software on the slow storage hard disk, and will often use the software on the solid-state drive, which can improve speed, but also for us to increase the storage space. It is said that the technology of storage equipment using fusion drive technology is very close to the performance of solid-state hard disk.

Fusion drive is different from previous hybrid/caching solutions, but its real differentiator is the software component. Fusion Drive does not simply borrow Intel Smart Response technology, it involves the virtual storage of the OS X Logical Volume Manager core storage. The Core storage first appeared in The Lion version, which allows the operating system to treat multiple physical disks as a logical volume.

Different storage and price list of Apple Computer: including fusion Drive

Unlike the traditional SSD cache architecture, Fusion drive is not a real cache, which moves data between SSD and HDD based on access frequency and free space. The capacity of a fusion drive is actually the sum of its components. In other words, a 1TB fusion drive capacity is actually 1TB + 128GB; a 3TB fusion drive capacity is 3TB + 128GB.

　　Some views on Fusion drive

The Apple Fusion drive may be the best ssd/hdd hybrid solution I've ever used. This is not cutting-edge science, it does is to combine a good SSD (Samsung PM830), a lot of NAND (128GB) and some very active, smart software (Apple's Core Storage LVM). Fusion Drive may not be an innovation, but its approach is certainly correct.

Apple imac

If you do not have a large number of applications and data, media files are not too large, then for you, the Fusion Drive drive should be a reasonable SSD plus HDD configuration, media large files to the HDD, all the often used things are on the SSD. I want a bigger cache, but I believe 128GB is good enough for most workloads and usage patterns today. For me personally, Fusion Drive can meet your needs.