Apple SSDs and the fusion drive ripoff
mactrast.com
mactrast.com
Most of what people pay Apple for is sorting all this stuff out, while many of us are capable of creating all sorts of hardware stacks most people just want something fast that they can store lots of stuff on, fusion drive delivers that.
To consumers it's a tradeoff between price and management, and to be fair for most people an extra $250 is probably well worth it to them vs. how complex managing that storage is to them. Fusion Drive is sold on consumer surplus not commodity.
Consumer surplus is the same reason programmers are so valuable to the economy, industry would rather pay someone else to figure out all this complex technology than invest the time in learning it themselves and saving themselves the cost of a programmer.
1) It explains nothing about how Fusion Drive works. In fact, it muddles the waters by likening it to SSD cache technologies, while it's simply not a cache at all.
2) The sources it links are speculation posted right after the announcement, when no technical details were available. Of course, the details have since come out and have been analyzed in detail, but the writer ignores that.
3) The custom SSD connector on laptops has absolutely nothing to do with Fusion Drive, since FD is offered on desktop machines only. The Apple laptops that have the custom connector come with pure SSD storage: there is no spinning HD to use for FD.
4) But at least that gives the writer an opportunity to claim that the custom connector makes it impossible to buy upgrades from third parties... only to then mention a third-party that makes compatible upgrades in the very next sentence. What?
5) You can use Fusion Drive on your entry-level Mac mini or iMac, actually. In fact, you don't even need a new Mac at all, and there are no hacks to do: it's all right there in OS X.
You can buy mSATA SSDs from many different manufacturers and they will work in any computer with a standard mSATA interface. By changing the shape of the connector, you can't use any of those drives in your Apple laptop. Only one company, OWC MacSales, has come up with a solution, but these only work with Apple laptops.
Pardon me but it's the first time ever I heard about tiered storage (not caching hybrids which is handled by the drives themselves) being available outside of datacenters. Doesn't explain the +250$ price.
Besides, the whole tone of the article is full of useless hatred. The point could have been made without such aggressiveness.
What's more, the proposed solution is ludicrous:
- buy an external SSD
- install OSX on it
- wipe the internal disk
- manually manage files/applications/whatnot to be stored on the SSD or the disk.
I can't even begin to describe how such a scheme is brittle and contrived.
Can we stop pretending everyone out there is technically inclined? To us technical folks who know how to actually build the CoreStorage tiered array, 250$ may look like a steep price, but to the huge amount of real people out there, the convenience is well worth 250$, and for those it's not worth, well they'd stay with a spinner anyway.
I find it very disappointing that hardware (especially laptop hardware) has been moving towards proprietary connectors solely for the purpose of extracting more money from consumers. Several years ago, I bought a new DVD burner for my IDE-based Toshiba Satellite, but it turns out that the laptop's IDE connector wasn't quite compatible with non-Toshiba drives and it ended up being a waste of $60 and several hours of my time. I also accidentally fried the laptop's board while trying to get it working. I haven't bought a Toshiba since.
[1]: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Mid+2012+...
Another point is that Apple’s SSD connector is different because they are already selling SSD configurations up to 768GB, while the current maximum for standard mSATA is only 256GB.
It seems like his issue is more with the price and compatibility of SSDs than anything with Fusion Drive. I'm not too familiar with the specifics of the situation, but it pre-dates Fusion. Starting on the MacBook Air a few years ago, they started using a proprietary connector with a smaller form factor for SSDs. This has since expanded to their other laptops and iMacs. At the time the SSD drives were significantly smaller than what I saw on the market, but that doesn't completely explain the proprietary connector. This is probably the biggest reason I'd consider other laptops when it's time for me to upgrade...so maybe it's good he's making noise about this.
As for the complaints about pricing, again I haven't followed details of SSDs too closely, but I know SSDs vary in price widely based on performance/quality--and the $80 SSD he links to has very mixed reviews. An inflated price is in line with Apple's spinning disk and RAM upgrades, so it's not surprising they'd overcharge. He also fudges some numbers by repeatedly saying Fusion Drive costs $450 ($200 because you have to upgrade from the base model and $250 for the SSD) but doesn't mention at all that the upgraded model doubles the spinning drive (500GB to 1TB) and gets you a i7 instead of an i5 processor (I was looking at the Mac mini).
At least for laptops, I think his suggestion of using an external SSD drive "will experience nearly every advantage that Fusion Drive has to offer – at a fraction of the cost" is absurd since the first thing you'd put on the SSD would be your OS--which I wouldn't want on an external drive.
For the iMac Mini, that is possible, and with such a connector, one can install a SSD as second drive in it (took me a few hours the first time round, but if I had to do it again, I think it would be an hour or so)
Of course that connector is hideously expensive (I guess iFixit would give it a BOM of $0.10 or so. I paid around $15,00, excluding shipping), but that is another issue.
A cheap, slow, bottom-of-the-line 128GB SSD (with lots of negative reviews on Amazon[1]) is $85, and Apple is charging $250 (the author lies at the end by calling it $450 to make it more sensational!) for it, so that's evil? And anti-consumer?! How about Fusion Drive's seamless integration with OS X? How about the fact that it works as a "single" logical drive (which is preferred over multiple logical drives if you were to purchase HDD/SSD separately)? How about "you don't have to worry about putting which file, where"? That's not worthy of putting in your BOM - only hardware is worth paying money for?
If it's just a minor software tweak, then I (in good heart) suggest the author to quit his job and create an equivalent for Linux/Windows and sell it for half what Apple sells FusionDrives and make a huge amount of money.
I've been wanting to buy one of those shiny Seagate Momentus XT ($180 for 768GB version) for almost two years I think, but apparently it's not good. The firmware is buggy as hell, especially for Mac. I remember there was a thread on Seagate's support forums with like a thousand angry messages, and after 2 months someone from Seagate told that "they're reaching out to some select customers to iron out minor problems that some people were having" and it took them months (again) to fix them. So it's not like "fusing" HDD and SSD is a solved problem...
Bottom line: We pay Apple, Google (well, indirectly), Intel and others to make decisions for us. I can buy a (slower) $85 SSD, put it in my Mac Pro and try to make it work like a fusion drive (which, contrary to what the author said, is not a caching mechanism!), or I can give Apple $250 for something that's better than that and be sure that my data wouldn't be removed because of some stupid configuration (and save hours of maintenance). I prefer paying for the service.
Edit: I love this comment from the article: OMG… The parts in a Ford, and the parts in a Mercedes cost almost the same, but Mercedes is RIPPING OFF customers by over-charging!
Edit 2: I forgot: The author clearly doesn't understand what FusionDrive is, and still thinks it's a caching system! (despite apparently reading the Ars article (that gets the facts right) and* the ExtremeTect link-baity article (that got the fact terribly wrong, but later corrected the article at the end)*.
http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org for Linux
https://blogs.oracle.com/brendan/entry/test for ZFS
And yes, Fusion drive is effectively a caching system.
> Fusion drive is effectively a caching system.
Oh... No, it's not. It's a block-level tiering solution which (mostly) promotes important "blocks" automatically and intelligently when computer is idle (so as not to slow things down when the user is working).
Very, very different from caching, very different technology (Apple has been working on CoreStorage, Apple's logical volume manager for years).
Ars article[1] has more info.
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/more-on-fusion-drive-ho...
People trust Apple. Are happy with Apple care. Don't mind paying a little extra for solutions that actually work and for a comparatively seamless user experience.
Haters gonna hate.
Do you have to buy it: no
I don't understand how people write long articles about Apple's pricing strategy. They can charge whatever they want and people will pay whatever it's worth to them.
From the technical point of view:
There is a nice Ars Technica post on how Intels SRT differs from fusion drive:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/more-on-fusion-drive-ho...
An excerpt:
> Intel SRT does not handle writes this way—whether it's operating as write-back or write-through cache, SRT mirrors writes (immediately or within a short amount of time) down to the hard disk, which is not the observed behavior. Plus, as has been noted, SRT currently doesn't work with SSDs larger than 64GB. It is absolutely clear that Fusion Drive does not use SRT.
As you can see, Apple does what it's best at:
1. Take existing technology
2. Improve it
3. Polish it
4. Sell it.
It's this final touch, attention to detail and hassle free operation that people seem to be willing to pay premium for.
In other words, I call bullshit on this whole article's technological assessment. (Though I can't disagree that it's kind of pricey, but not so much as to be called a "ripoff", at least objectively)
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/10/more-on-fusion-drive-ho...
"modifying standard connectors to remove your choices" - I'd argue they did it for performance issues, not some conspiracy to get you to buy their adapters. Modifying things to suit a different purpose is engineering.
"charging you more for that is evil." - You charge what your customers will pay, not what it costs you to produce. It's a business, not a charity.
Take emotion out of it and just look at the facts.
The article clearly says it's the same connector that's just modified. How can modifying just a connector affect performance? You are free to support Apple, as long as you have the facts straight.
Claiming something vaguely true may be marketing. Claiming something incorrect and calling it marketing is at least dodgy.
Definitely agree with you on your marketing point. If it can be proven incorrect then it's not ok (nor is it legal). I think they use the word "revolutionary" in place of the old go-to "best". Everyone can say they're the best because it can't be proven wrong. It's subjective. Take, for example, a smartphone screen. Objective observations can be made about the screen size, but personal preference makes "best" subjective.
http://www.macworld.com/article/2014011/how-to-make-your-own...
If you're buying an apple product, pricing is low on your list.
With this Fusion system I get almost the best of both.
The Fusion Drive may not reach it's goals, but it is designed to fill this space, and if it was 50$ less expensive it would be awesome, IMHO.
That doesn't really match apple's $200+ - lenovo can do it for free to some extent.