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Apple Fusion Drive: Speedtest & Demo [Video]

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Zeke - 7 months ago
So it's an Apple branded hybrid hard drive, huh? We've had these for YEARS in the PC world. Nothing new..
Tipp - 7 months ago
No genius, you've never had this, and it is new in the consumer PC world. This is enterprise level tiered storage. It is 2 separate drives - 1 SSD for speed + 1 standard HDD for capacity - intelligently managed at the OS level as one logical drive. It's not a cache like in hybrid drives. Data is actually moved back and forth between the 2 physical disks depending on how frequently the data is used. Windows has never had support for automatic tiered storage like this, not even Windows 8. If you want more info, read through this post and its comments. http://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/31/apples-new-fusion-drive-works-on-older-macs/
Tipp - 7 months ago
And for the record, the hybrid drives you're thinking of are completely hardware based. They have worked with Macs since they arrived because they appear to any OS as a normal HDD. The flash caching that happens on them is managed by the controller on the HDD itself.
Zeke - 7 months ago
I didn't actually get to watch the video, I just made an assumption. That sounds pretty cool! I'll watch it later (I'm in a class at the moment). Thanks for letting me know there's more to it, or I would have just dissmissed it :P
KsidE - 7 months ago
Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive (from Seagate) * a 7200 rpm HDD coupled to 8GB of SLC NAND http://www.seagate.com/au/en/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-xt-hybrid/ http://www.anandtech.com/show/5160/seagate-2nd-generation-momentus-xt-750gb-hybrid-hdd-review It has been available for years.
Tipp - 7 months ago
Oye. Did you read any of the other comments? Apple's Fusion Drive is not the same thing as Seagate's hybrid drives. Previous hybrid drives use a small amount of flash storage (4-8GB usually) on the actual HDD motherboard, which acts as a cache. The flash storage in Seagate's drives don't permanently store information, they just use it to speed up the copy process for the user. In Apple's Fusion drive (aka enterprise tiered storage), heavily used data is actually stored permanently on the SSD. It's also composed of a separate SSD and traditional HDD combination.
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