Apple's Fusion Drive: hybrid done right!
Summary: Apple takes their trademark top-of-the-line approach with the Fusion drive: a 128GB SSD built into a 1 or 3TB hard drive. Suddenly every other hybrid drive looks like old news. And they are.
Thanks to friendly Seagate PR folks I've played with their 1st and 2nd gen hybrid drives - a technology Seagate pioneered - and found them both a worthy advance on hard drives. But I also felt they were under-configured and that at least 32GB of flash would be needed to make a really snappy hybrid drive.
Apple is kickstarting the hybrid drive market with an obviously superior product.
Apple goes big
Apple storage engineers were thinking along the same lines, only bigger. There is no doubt in my mind that for 95% of all iMac buyers, the new Fusion Drive will give them SSD performance with HDD capacity.
They'll be happy campers. They'd better be, because I'd guess Apple will charge their usual $2GB - or another $250 - on top of their normal outrageous HDD prices. Say $500 for the 3TB Fusion Drive.
But as sales guys like to say: "The bitterness of poor performance remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten." And as the former owner of a quad-core i7 iMac whose performance was hamstrung by a 7200 rpm 1TB drive, I have to agree.
People who use iMacs for work will gladly pay the money.
The Storage Bits take
If HDD vendors want to stay in business, hybrid drives are a necessity. 1TB drives are overkill for most consumers, and the old strategy of same capacity in a smaller form factor has run out of steam.
But vendor price timidity has not helped the hybrid concept. Middling improvements don't win consumer's hearts - or wallets.
Apple has again leveraged their dominance of the $1k+ PC market to introduce the Fusion Drive - the hybrid all others will be measured against - to the only customers who can afford them: Apple customers. And what do you bet they have Fusion Drive production committed for the next 12 months, so PC competitors couldn't buy them if they wanted to?
In kickstarting the hybrid market, Apple has done consumers and the storage industry a huge favor.
Comments welcome, of course. While I'm happy with my 500GB SSD, I think I'd be even happier with 2.5" 1TB/128GB Fusion Drive.
Update: My friend and unindicted co-conspirator Stephen Foskett did a deeper dive on the Apple announcement and thinks the evidence points to a combination of a standard hard drive a 128GB SSD with a Mountain Lion specific driver that handles the management of file movement between the two.
Given my long time concerns over HFS+ data integrity, I don't think letting the OS move the data is a good idea. But we don't know for sure yet. In any case, going big with a flash cache - bigger than the drive vendors have yet gone - is still the right call. End update.
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Talkback
What so specail of this Fusion drive?
This has Apple's special sauce all over it
Second, it costs more. Everyone knows that if it costs more, it is better, it is innovative, and it is revolutionary.
Finally, it has an apple on it. Everyone knows that an apple a day keeps the doctor away and no one wants to be close to a doctor.
So that's what is so special about Fusion:
1. Name
2. Price
3. Logo
Maybe if you actually watched the presentation rather than guessing....
1) Hybrid may be a dumb name, but that isn't Apple's problem (though I don't think its a dumb name either).
2) Apple has revolutionised domestic backup restore by building in a system where the average user can actually restore selected files from his backup without having to seek expert help. It doesn't hurt that MacOS can completely and reliably back itself up in a restorable state, while running from the disk that you are backing up. Not a trick that Windows was ever too good at.
3) Apple hasn't called the concept of SSD/HHD Fusion. Its called its SSD/HHD/Software combo which lets the OS predictively control and optimise the allocation between SSD and HHD, Fusion. Hybrid never claimed to do that. I'm not sure that there was already a name for it.
4) I suggest that you continue to work on the pick up technique.
5) From experience many people will trust the name, price, logo and benefit from Fusion. Thats because Apple rarely let people down. Do you have a problem with that?
That is so innovative
I really wish I was kidding with my sarcasm above but you really can't make this stuff up.
Well, you said it yourself, Todd. This hybrid capacity has never been
Gee, did I say innovative?
What I did say was slightly more complicated: that by building a cost-be-damned hybrid drive that will appeal to power users, Apple is giving consumers and the storage/PC industries a newer and higher bar for hybrid technology. Other vendors can offer cheaper hybrids that, thanks to the publicity Apple's adoption will give hybrid technology, will find greater acceptance than hybrids have before.
That's a little complicated, I know, but sometimes reality is complicated. Deal.
Robin
Except this isn't even a higher bar
But just to clarify Robin, are you now going to go on the record as stating that the Fusion drive is NOT innovative? Yes or no Robin, you can't have it both ways.
Please, elucidate!
Give me a link, please!
Boom goes the dynamite
By Chris Hadley on July 23, 2012 at 10:44 am
"OCZ have answered this request by creating the RevoDrive Hybrid which combines a 1TB hard drive with 128GB of Raw MLC flash memory"
Oh snap!
That's a bitchslap of truth right there
Nice to see you're backing a struggling might someday be
Oh, the OCZ drive
Did you by any chance notice this isn't an SATA drive? Did you notice how much it costs? Did you notice that is in fact an "normal" OCZ Revo PCI-expres SSD with bolted-on Hitachi HDD? Not the prettiest of setups, quite bulky and by the way, if you need to do anything like that -- you could do it yourself (that is, have an 128GB SSD + an 1TB HDD) -- it will cost less, use less space and possibly be higher performing.
Fusion Drive
I think you missed this, it is not just a simple hybrid drive. This article explains it a bit:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/23/3543876/apple-fusion-drive-imac-mac-mini
Oh, what a wonderful link you just posted
"Of course, this hybrid drive technology isn't new — in a lot of ways, Apple's new "fusion drive" sounds a lot like this OCZ hybrid drive (and other similar drives), which also has a 1TB HDD as well as 128GB of flash storage."
So to answer kenosha above, Apple hasn't even innovated the 128GB SSD hybrid. Oops.
And further from the article:
"It also mentions the Dataplex caching software which combines the mechanical drive with the solid state flash to give one seamless drive with the improved performance of an SSD"
So proeger, this dynamic relationship that you talk about isn't innovative at all. All been done before.
This is yet another Apple me-too product that Robin is only fawning over because it has an Apple logo on it. How much do you want to bet that Apple doesn't even make the drive?
The ONLY thing that Apple has contributed that is new is the name. That's it. There is absolutely nothing Apple or innovative about this drive. Well, the price is Apple. Ironically, Robin even thinks that this is one of the selling features of the drive.
You can't make this stuff up.
you still aren't getting what the innovation claim is about
So same end result, different approach
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_tiered_storage
"Automated Tiered Storage is the automated progression or demotion of data across different tiers (types) of storage devices and media. This movement of data is automatic to the different types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements."
Oops. So much for UNIQUE and A GREAT IDEA from the brains at Apple.
Windows also does something like this by moving often used applications to the outside of a disk so they can be read faster (data IO is faster for data physically living closer to the outside of a disk).
This concept is old and gives you the same benefits as data caching that you sneer at.
What makes me laugh about this whole discussion is while all of you Apple fanbois cheer the fact that 95% of the world doesn't need a traditional PC and should instead be buying an iPad, you are going absolutely nuts over a desktop technology that gives a tiny benefit to 0.1% of desktop users. With cloud storage and the plummeting price of SSD (screw hybrid) there are very few people who would ever benefit from these hybrid drives and even the benefits they see are tiny. I have a 100GB SSD drive and a ~700GB HDD drive in my laptop and this system absolutely flies. It boots faster than my iPad.
Who's sneering?
By the way
I am surprised you didn't mention Microsoft, who "invented" this technology :-)
The devil's in the details
That said, the devil is in the details. Apple has successfully patented their process ('877 patent). Also, to date, we've seen nothing like what Apple is claiming in terms of performance in the PC market with existing technology. If you have specific examples to cite which contradicts this claim then I'd be interested in seeing those details. Claiming to have a HD and a SSD is great, but if you have to manage what goes where manually, you've missed the point.