What is Fusion Drive

The release of the updated iMac and was marked by the appearance of such an interesting thing as a Fusion Drive. This technology is designed to solve the actual problem, which can be characterized as "I want to SSD speed and capacity HDD and without bread, please." So what is it like to this technology?

Fusion Drive on the hardware level - two separate drives, one of which is a solid state drive (SSD), and the second drive is a usual storage on hard disk (HDD). Apple decided to include in its Fusion Drive variations of products with the SSD capacity, equal to 128 GB HDD and variations 1TB and 3TB. Simply put, all the magic Fusion Drive is carried out at the operating system level, and is the frequency of monitoring reference to particular applications and data and transfers them in accordance with this frequency to SSD, HDD or a storage device.

Even easier: the operating system and all-all-all that you often run, listen and watch (the browser, for example), will be stored on the SSD fast, and the rest - to the HDD. If you suddenly start to learn Photoshop and become run it every day, then this app, as well as data (your artistry) associated with it, too, migrated to the SSD.

Fusion Drive - it's not caching

More precisely, Fusion Drive concept does not provide that the data from the HDD to the SSD duplicated. SSD is not acting as a place exclusively for faster processing, available for data storage. Here the user gets all the usable space on both drives, that is, if you have a 128GB SSD and 1 TB HDD, then you will have at its disposal a 1.12 TB of disk space available for data storage.

Fusion Drive - it's not RAID

As mentioned above, the work of Fusion Drive is carried out at the operating system level. Disk Utility detects 2 separate drive, and operating system converts them into a single space.

How to be a backup

Backups should be done as before. Time Machine will back up as if you have one drive. In case of death of one of the drives, whether the HDD or SSD, the user will have to make a full recovery. However, if the backup is not present, the user will probably be able to extract data from a live disk, at least it's almost 100% likely to be done by using additional tools.

How to be a substitute for

Apple pointed out that structurally HDD and SSD in their product does not differ from the other disks producers, so if you got burned one of the disks, then you can replace it on the side of the disc manufacturer.

recording Features

A great advantage with the speed point of view is that all recorded data is initially written to the SSD, and we know that everything is written to the SSD faster. Of course, in the future OS will determine how often you access to the recorded data, and will decide whether to leave them on the SSD Hustler need, or transfer to the HDD.

questions

There remains a lot of questions about this shuffling data from SSD and HDD. As far as the OS can properly determine what data should be transferred to the HDD, which left to the SSD? What will such a system users who shovel tons of data in transit form and not keep download the information for a long time (FullHD downloaded five movies watched blew movies, downloaded, looked, and blew so Further)? Will not affect whether the excess from a hardware point of view of the cycles of writing and reading while shuffling data between disks on the life of the discs themselves (especially critical for SSD)? How will the background shuffling data between disks on the system performance when moving data? We hope that Apple will take into account everything.