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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

It’s a fusion drive so most “normal people” likely won’t notice unless they have a huge photo library.

My guess is they want 1TB so they can upsell you to 3 or 4TB, which would be prohibitively expensive with SSDs right now.

Edit: I was wrong, the lowest tier iMacs actually have a 1TB regular drive. That’s crazy considering the lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

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I made the mistake of buying an iMac last year with a fusion drive. I assumed that since it was an Apple product it would have relatively good performance. It is unbelievably slow and negates the high performance characteristics of the rest of the system.

I have tremendous buyer's remorse and rarely use the machine. Whenever I do use it, the feeling I get is "how could Apple do this to its brand?". The machine cost over $3K and is slower than a $400 Intel NUC for all practical purposes.

The lack of upgradability adds insult to injury. Apple would be better off putting in solid state storage that is a few generations old, as it would still be orders of magnitude faster than the mechanical drive.

So you couldn’t just by an SSD external drive and boot off of that?

So now you have to carry an external HDD around with you and plug it in every time you want it to boot up?

We're talking about iMacs. In case it's not clear, that's a desktop system not a portable one.

Ah. I got mixed up. Thanks.

They only put the anachronistic drives in iMacs which are desktop computers. You could leave a fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD permanently attached, and it would perform like a 2019 computer.

Are you carrying around an iMac with you? If you are, the drive is the least of your issues.

You mean you dont? https://i.imgur.com/RUN11Hb.jpg

A $3k desktop for which you need to buy an external drive. At some point slavishness to the Apple brand must have a breaking point.

Not wanting to start a fanboy war but I am a big believer in the right tool for the right job at the right price. For $3k I could build a monster PC with a stunning screen.

If you’re buying a “$3000” iMac you’re not buying one with a fusion drive....

Canadian price for a top-end 27" Retina iMac is $3079, and has a 2TB Fusion drive standard. The 512GB SSD option is $120 more than the Fusion drive.

A quarter of the storage at a premium price isn't exactly appealing to a lot of people, regardless of how much faster it may be.

You know there is a way that you can configure what you want for your budget....

I maxed out the CPU and got a lot of RAM, I assumed the drive would have enough cache that I wouldn't notice the spindle aspect.

And now that you see it isn’t the case after that you couldn’t just say “my bad” and spend the < $200 for an SSD drive?

I think the SSD would have been $500 more, which I would have happily paid if I had realized how poorly the fusion drive would perform.

So you would have been willing to spend $500 morethen but not spend much less and buy an external drive now?

I’m not unwilling to buy an external drive, but I’d rather have a better internal drive.

Isn't the point of an iMac the fact that it's a clean, uncluttered device?

If you are willing to accept separate components, you can buy much cheaper hardware.

Seeing that hardly any reputable company sells 5K displays anymore besides LG, the monitor itself is worth $1300. The cheapest 5K iMac is $1800. You’re not going to find computers “much cheaper” than $500 that match the iMacs specs.

That's quite the opposite of my experience where only very cold data is not SSD-level performance. Do you have anything like anti-virus software which might be interfering with the HSM mechanism?

In my experience most of what I end up needing ends up cold. Even XCode builds take forever on it due to the slow storage.

Now I’m wondering how to get visibility into it. I work with a ton of repos and never see this - it’s usually just things like old VMs.

Get a thunderbolt drive caddy and boot from external Thunderbolt disk. Refreshed an old iMac this wayz

I did the same. OS and apps on a cheap 240GB Thunderbolt SSD. Everything else on the internal 1TB spinning disk. Now it’s fantastic.

I pulled the screen off and installed an SSD. Easy to do

Any links to a tutorial on how to do this? I'd love to do that but also don't want to crack the screen in the process.

ifixit.com has _extremely_ well done step-by-step upgrade guides: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/iMac_Intel

Something sounds wrong. I have an older 21.5 with the first generation 1 TB fusion and it is not at all slow.

First generation 1TB fusion drives had 128GB of SSD storage. 2017 and 2019 1TB fusion drives have 32GB of SSD storage [1], which is basically just enough for the OS and a couple of apps if you are lucky. People are not exaggerating when they say Apple hardware are regressing, not progressing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive

That explains it. I hadn't actually used one before purchasing it but had used the previous generation model a few times.

The size need only be proportional to the amount of hot data. And realistically, it need only be proportional to the amount of hot data that's randomly accessed in small chunks, because that's where the bulk of the improvements will come from.

I wonder why the performance ain't so great. I bet 32GBytes is in principle more than sufficient.

Putting/letting Jony Ive on designing the new campus is one of the dumbest things Apple has done. Effectively dereliction of duty.

Now that he's back on task, I'm holding my breath that there are some mea culpas in the next round of hardware updates. If there aren't some significant quality improvements I'll probably still get a new laptop, but I'll be selling my shares.

If it's less than a year old, it's under warranty. Take it in (or send it in) and make Apple look at it. It should not be that slow.

I have the 5k iMac with slow hard drive. I ended up getting a USB3 SSD and booting the system from that drive. Works great. much faster.

I mean... they will notice that their computer sucks, but they might not know why. 5400 rpm is a joke considering you can buy a 7200 rpm drive with belly button lint and a serviceable SSD for $100 or less. There are budget laptops at Best Buy you can get with 7200 rpm drives standard, and even that is borderline unacceptable with how cheap SSDs are now.

You can buy 2TB M.2 SSD drives for $220 retail now.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682016...

QLC drives are not equivalent to TLC or MLC drives in performance or durability, which is what apple is using.

They will sell you a brand new macbook air with 128gb of storage that you can't upgrade. I can't even back up my phone with that. They literally don't care at all.

> lowest tier Mac is almost always the most popular.

Because 90% don't need computing power; they just browse Facebook and Spotify.

The Fusion Drive is available for $100 more, if you actually need to access local storage.

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