Apple's Fusion Drive – Choice is Your's

Fusion drive, a storage technology developed by Apple and announced along with the launch of new iMac & Mac Mini on 23rd October, 2012 .

Making it easy for you to understand, It just work like a combination of the hard drive & cache memory in traditional computer systems where hard drive is used to store the data permanently and a cache memory is used to store & serve the recent or most frequently accessed data. Similarly, a Fusion drive is a combined implementation of a hard drive with another faster flash drive, typically an SSD.

How fusion drive actually works?

Though, there are two drives connected (Mac HD & SSD) but will be presented to you as a single logical drive with combined storage capacity in your new Mac Mini or  iMac. Now, it comes to the actual working of the fusion drive, when configured, the operating system automatically send/store the frequently accessed applications, documents, files, photos & other data in the faster flash drive and rest of the data which is less referenced will remain stored in the main Hard drive.

Now, whenever a file or application is accessed from the HDD, it gets stored in the SSD for a faster access when requested next time. An interesting thing to note down here is that, the data stored in SSD if not accessed for a while will be moved back to the HDD to make a room for other applications/data.

How would I be benefited if I buy a Mac Mini or iMac configured with fusion drive?

Fusion drive is developed solely fo increasing the read/write speed or ultimately the performance of your latest Mac Mini or iMac. So, that's the only but the most important factor your should choose a fusion drive.

Still confused? Let me tell exactly how much you will be benefited from a fusion drive? Have a look at the below image indicating the increase in performance when you get fusion drive pre-configured. 

As you can see from the above image, the photo import speed in Apple Aperture, will be increased by 3.5 times, copying speed shall be fasten by 3.5 times and the system boot speed will be increased by 1.7 times provided you are using a 1TB hard drive of at least 7200-RPM.

So, overall fusion system is like a caching solution that only increases the speed of read/write operations.

Adding more about it, consider the below mentioned points before making a decision of buying a Mac Mini or iMac pre-configured with fusion drive

• If you wish to use an external drive as a part of fusion drive, it's not possible, at least till yet.
• You can not partition the flash storage in the fusion drive.
• If you create a hard drive partition on fusion drive, it will be treated like a separate volume that is physically located on the hard drive.
• The fusion drive support is limited to Mac OS X 10.8.2 if you are attempting to mount it in target disk mode.
• The third party disk utilities may not work properly or at all on fusion drive.
• The earlier versions of Mac disk utility will not work with the fuson drive as the disk utility comes with it is completely unique.

Though, you can still create a Windows partition on fusion drive using bootcamp to play with Microsoft Windows.

Coming to the price of Mac Mini with fusion drive, you will need to pay at least $450 more if you are planning to buy $599 version, reason, the fusion drive option is only available in the latest Mac mini priced $799, in short, $250 extra for alone fusion drive in addition the the latest Mac mini.

And, the compatible iMac will be available somewhere in November itself but you can expect almost ($250) the same increased price for fusion dive pre-configured.

So, choice is yours.....

Breaking the myths of Mac defragmentation:

I own a Mac which means mean no computer virus, hacker or malware can penetrate into my system. This is not only a single myth that Mac users have in their minds. Another one is regarding fragmentation of the hard drive with the passage of time. Mac users are not to be blamed for the profiling of Mac hard drive fragmentation because, Apple itself suggest that there is no need to defrag a Mac hard drive because the OS is smart enough to defrag files of up to 20 MB of size by its own.

How Apple explains not to choose defragmentation for the drive:

1. In comparison to traditional hard drive, today the drives are of larger capacity offering huge amount of free space even after plenty amount of stored data. 


2. The later line on OS (10.2 & so-on), incorporates & permits small number of allocations to get combine into a single big allocation. This happens due to delayed allocation in Ex-formatted volumes.


3. Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering system works to revise the entire file space rather than just adding the new data to a current file. 

However, defragmentation is not entirely denied by Apple:

Defragging thousands of minor files which are rarely or never accessed will have no effect on the performance of the OS X hard drive. Apparently, a user's profession and interest may require to work upon large applications like, video editing (other software), and this might result in fragmentation files in the drive. Thus, a need of removing fragments from the files may be knocking at the door of a Mac OS X.

Will partitioning the drive help in minimizing fragmentation:

Yes, splitting the hard drive into multiple volumes will separate the system files that undergoes number of read/writes from those delicate zones where files are repeatedly added and removed. To some extent, the partitioning strategy will help in defragmentation and optimization of the drive.

To Note: You won't find an in-built defrag option in Mac's disk utility, instead have to rely on a non-Apple tool.

Taking help of a non-Apple utility to defrag:

1. Eliminating slacks spaces on the drive: With the available feature of the 'Optimization', a specific volume can be selected for removing slacks. Slacks are nothing but the unused free space created when files are stored on irregular memory locations thus creating blank spaces between files. These blank spaces becomes useless and need for optimization arises. To do the needful, select the drive and choose the optimization option to remove these slacks by arranging the files on verging memory locations.





2. Full defragmentation enables the software to represent the entire hard drive into block-wise formation to the user where each block is analyzed for fragments and free space. The blocks are presented by particular colors indicating the report. 

Precautions before opting for defragmentation:

1. If the hard drive is out of space then the software might prompt you with an error message which is "No Unused space available". To solve this error, try to free some of the space on the hard drive so that the defrag tool can use that space for repositioning of the files.


2. If you select a drive with bad sectors then the drive defrag software might freezes up depending upon the presence of bad blocks on the drive.
   
3. Arrange proper backup measures before opting for defrag.