what is a fusion drive?

[Ashleyyyy]

what exactly is a fusion drive? i've used an iMac that has one a few times and it feels more sluggish than a ssd but not as bad as a standard hdd...

[TheGlenlivet]

It's apples name for a combo SSD/HDD.  Has a small cache of Flash storage combined with a bigger HDD.  Not as good as a SSD but better than an HDD, usually.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202574

[Crunchy Dragon]

Quote

Fusion Drive is Apple Inc.'s name for its implementation of a hybrid drive. Apple's implementation combines a hard disk drive with a NAND flash storage and presents it as a single Core Storage managed logical volume with the space of both drives combined.

From Wikipedia.

 

I guess that would explain your experience being between the two, as it basically is a hybrid drive.

[Ashleyyyy]

6 minutes ago, TheGlenlivet said:

It's apples name for a combo SSD/HDD.  Has a small cache of Flash storage combined with a bigger HDD.  Not as good as a SSD but better than an HDD, usually.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202574

 

6 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

From Wikipedia.

 

I guess that would explain your experience being between the two, as it basically is a hybrid drive.

oh okay that makes sense. 

[DrMacintosh]

Basically an SSD/HDD combo that relocates files you use often into the SSD portion and less frequently accessed files into the HDD. 

 

Its in an attempt to balance storage space and drive speed. For a long time SSDs had been really expensive so they could just go all SSD but that would give users relatively little space if they wanted to not fork over $4,000 just for an iMac with 1TB of storage. 

[Firewrath9]

apple seriously overcharges for SSD, just void the 90 day warranty and add your own ssd.

[TheGlenlivet]

27 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

apple seriously overcharges for SSD, just void the 90 day warranty and add your own ssd.

https://www.ifixit.com/ FTW!!!