I have one in my new Mac Mini and I'm very happy with it. Combined with Time Machine backups it makes for a very efficient, very reliable consumer storage setup.
It's not going to be faster than caching[1] and suffers from a lot of potential data loss scenarios.
Yes, you get your 32 or 64 gig of SSD back, but who cares?
Tiered storage is used in enterprise environments to maximize the use of expensive fast storage, or insanely cheap very slow storage. Like say, really really high end PCI express based cards, or really cheap but high latency tape drives. However, this makes a lot less sense in a consumer environment where consumer SSD prices are dropping 50% year over year.
http://camelcamelcamel.com/OCZ-Technology-Vertex-2-5-Inch-VT...
They also make a lot less sense with only two tiers anyway.
So, to review,
1. Unlike the original claim, "fusion drives" are not new technology, or pioneering (since, as you point out, it's been available in enterprise storage systems for quite a while)
2. It's not clear it's actually better than the caching system others use.
3. It's not clear it makes financial sense.
[1] On the read side, you could use the same algorithm for deciding to move to cache as oyu do in tiered storage, and get identical performance. On the write side, you can use the SSD as a data journal and perform writes as fast as you can write to SSD. In a tiered storage model, all storage usually starts out on the "normal" tier, so writes will be slower, reads may be faster.
If they use some weirder model (like data journaling to ssd), then it becomes equivalent to cache (in both time and space usage, not just time) , not "better".
Really? I could have got tiered storage on my new sub-$1000 computer I got last month? Which vendor could I get that from, Dell, Hp, Acer?
>It's not clear it's actually better than the caching system others use....
It's just a different technology with different characteristics, it's not a question of better or worse.
One obvious benefit is that you get the sum of the two drive's capacity. Also the two drives are on two different drive connections, not a single connection to a combined device, so there may be bandwidth efficiencies as well. But you just sit there stewing in your own distain. God forbid that anyone try anything different or unusual, that's got to be bad, right?
2. I never claimed it was cheap, i objected to acting like this technology is new. It's quite widely used in the enterprise world.
3. The cache model has the drives on two different connections as well. See Intel's Rapid Storage Technology.
4. I think i refuted the idea that the sum of the two drives capacity is useful in the current market (it's slower and not cheaper enough).
5. I'm all for different or unusual. I object to them choosing a marketing buzzword and pretending they've come up with some heretofore unthought of technology. I think I made that clear when I objected to calling it pioneering or new technology.