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About Fusion Drive

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24 pointsryannielsen10 comments

Apple defaulting the iMac to cheap, slower 5400 RPM drives is scandalous, as is their making the 21-inch iMac's RAM slots non user-serviceable. I've spent a small fortune on Mac hardware over the years, but locking the user out of doing their own hardware upgrades (while charging factory upgrade fees that are miles out of line from market prices) is just naked greed.

Apple is certainly greedy; you can't have $100B in CASH without being greedy. But, I don't think 21" iMacs not having user-upgradable RAM is entirely Apple being greedy. You know, 21" and 27" aren't like low-end 13" MBP and high-end MBP. They're different beasts, with different sizes, with different guts. Maybe the smaller one needed the RAM slots on one side buried before, say GPU, while the other needed them on the other side in front of HDD and thus was more accessible.

I'm 100% against making desktop computers thin though. Just make it 5x thicker and then cram anything you can inside that thing, and let there be plenty of space for the air to freely blow past GPU so it doesn't burn display. And while you're at it, you can even add some batteries so the iMac wouldn't turn off for a few hours if it's unplugged, or when the power is temporarily out (which results in lost user data, and if they were upgrading OS X, results in "very, very bad things").

Agreed. It's like Apple has some sort of eating disorder where they are obsessed with thin-ness beyond reason.

It certainly makes sense to make a portable computer as thin and light as possible. But I never carry my iMac around and, sitting in front of it, I can't tell whether it is 5mm or 5cm.

I'd love for them to add a small battery to keep it running a half and hour on a power outage. Or upgradable RAM, disk, etc.

Really, I think the issue is they want them to be like televisions. Nobody upgrades a television, they just go out and buy a new own.

>Apple defaulting the iMac to cheap, slower 5400 RPM drives is scandalous

Have you considered that the reason might be to prevent iMacs from getting too loud?

What's the difference between them, 3 decibels? I've frequently upgraded hard drives in my macbooks, and always upgraded to 7200rpm drives. I've never noticed a difference in volume, the fans are always much louder than the hard drive.

When I wrote "getting too loud", I meant getting louder over the years, not when the drive is new.

Consumer-grade drives that spin faster than 5400 rpm have been available since the late 1990s. That suggests to me that there's some reason other than cost why they still make 5400-rpm drives. (Maybe reliability rather than noise.)

From what I've read, the reliability is approximately the same. The real advantage of 5400 rpm drives is in heat and power. These are are valid concerns if you're running a data center but moot points in a desktop computer.

It does give the hybrid drive they're hawking a leg up in the comparison chart if they compare it to a 5400 rpm drive instead of a 7200 rpm...

"Yes, but the system attempting to mount the Fusion Drive in Target Disk Mode must have OS X Mountain Lion version 10.8.2 or later."

Implies that "Fusion Drive" is already part of CoreStorage in 10.8.2. :)

That's exciting.

One thing I'm worried about is Linux. The article says you can add only one partition. If you want to install more than one OS, or have separate root, home and boot partitions, what would you do?

I'd be interested to know if you can un-bind the two fused drives back into a SSD and HDD.

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