Apple Fusion Drive

Rain

Rain

Fractal Fanatic
Hi everyone I'm buying and configuring a new Mac Mini and I want to make sure that the Fusion Drive will be fast enough for Recording and Music production. Does anyone have any insight ?
 
Avoid fusion drives for any audio or video work. Not good for large files. Stick to a fast hard drive or a SSD.
 
Yeah, Fusion is notorious for failure. Use an SSD for critical and OS program's and files. A regular HDD will suffice for samples, music and photos, or anything that doesn't rely on fast read/write speeds.
 
Can someone define "fusion drive" to make sure we are all talking about the same thing please?
 
Apple's Fusion Drive works excellent and will give you plenty of throughput for recording. You are basically recording to an SSD Device.

The person with the 3TB Fusion Drive that died had a different product. That was a Hard Disk with some internal memory and was manufactured by Seagate.

I would recommend the fusion drive as a very cost effective way to get disk speed and disk space.
 
Regardless of the drive you choose for your OS- (operating system) You should always record your audio sessions to another drive, could be firewire,Thunderbolt. Not to the same drive that your OS is on. My 2-cents from years in that industry.
 
Personally, I notice no speed difference whosoever between an SSD alone and a 256GB SSD + 750GB HDD Fusion Drive. Works great for me. Now, obviously the reliability of two devices will be equal to the reliability of the least reliable one, but combined with Time Machine backups, I don't think I care.
 
mcgyver said:
Regardless of the drive you choose for your OS- (operating system) You should always record your audio sessions to another drive, could be firewire,Thunderbolt. Not to the same drive that your OS is on. My 2-cents from years in that industry.
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I've been partitioning all my PCs' drives for some years. That they don't come this way is almost criminal. But I'm wondering if there's the same issue with a Fusion Drive (first I've heard of it actually), as they are physically different.....maybe there's an option in the firmware to wipe only one drive at a time?

I don't see a need to write to a separate drive by itself (though the data partition being synced to another drive makes sense), though if the practice is moving to SSDs for OS, and standard for data, then there's no issue.
 
Loquenau said:
I've been partitioning all my PCs' drives for some years. That they don't come this way is almost criminal. But I'm wondering if there's the same issue with a Fusion Drive (first I've heard of it actually), as they are physically different.....maybe there's an option in the firmware to wipe only one drive at a time?

I don't see a need to write to a separate drive by itself (though the data partition being synced to another drive makes sense), though if the practice is moving to SSDs for OS, and standard for data, then there's no issue.
Click to expand...

It's not partioning... Hybrid drives such as Fusion transparently place hot blocks in SSD while locating cold or less frequently used blocks on the physical spindles... To the user it appears as a single drive/mount point.
 
I have a Mac Mini with a 1TB Fusion drive (which has been explained as a 128GB SSD coupled with a 1T HDD). I find the combination to be 'wicked' fast - almost like working with SSD exclusively (and my MBPro Retina and my Mac Pro both have SSD, so I know what it is like. The only gotcha is that the HDD in the Fusion Drive pairing is only 5400 RPM. Depending on how busy the 'cache' drive is and how much you are recording, you could end up operating at slower HDD speeds.

On the other hand, 128GB is a LOT of cache.
 
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