Worth going all Apple?

Frenzied Wombat_sl said:

Yeah, SSHD's aka hybrid drives have been available for awhile, but anybody worth their salt would rather do what Kegkilla said- buy an SSD for your OS, and a normal HD for your programs/media. Why spend more money for a hybrid drive that isn't as fast as a pure SSD and doesn't benefit my gigs of movies, pictures,etc anyways? It's not that hard, install OS to C:, choose D: drive for all programs.

The market for SSHD's is laptops, where you can generally only support one HD. In this case you face the conundrum of having a 256GB SSD for a fast experience but little space for all ones media, or a shitty 5400 rpm terabyte HD that has tons of space but performs like shit. In that case, a 500GB SSHD makes a nice compromise.

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SSD use is OS + frequently used programs. Why would you put everything else on the mechanical drive? My SSD has Windows, itunes, games I play often and other shitand it's only an old 80gb X-25M. With some of the prices today on 256gb drives at like 180 bucks you could put almost everything on a SSD minus music and movies.

The point is, with a manual SSD/HDD setup, you have a CHOICE. I personally install MS Office on my normal HD, but if I'd LIKE to, I could install it on my SSD. For me personally, I don't care if MS Word takes 2 seconds to load vs 1. The point is I have a choice. Fusion drive is the exact same physical setup as the typical manual config-- an SSD with a seperate hard disk, except you no longer have the choice of what goes where, the superduper Apple algorithm decides for you. Don't touch your photoshop for a few days? Well now it just got moved to your normal HDD. In exchange for not having to think for yourself, you get an overall experience that is somewhere in between a pure SSD and HD. The experience even becomes a larger and larger compromise as you add storage beyond the capacity of the 128gb SSD drive, as now the algorithm has a far more difficult time figuring out what to put where. If your computer is just an appliance to you and you don't want to make any conscious choices in how you organize data at the expense of optimzied performance, fusion drive is great.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6679/a...fusion-drive/7

This technology has been around for quite some time in the Enterprise SAN arena. One of the big "selling points" at a certain point was "intelligent storage"- -which is exactly what the superduper apple algorithm is. The SAN vedors stated that the SAN would "intelligently" move data between SSD, 15K, 10K, and Sata drives based on data usage patterns. The days of manually deciding what data to put where, only to have it sit on "fast" disk space when unused would be a thing of the past. It will move this unused data to slower storage, thereby saving you $$$. Unfortunately, "intelligent" wasn't as intelligent as a human.. That file share you initially put on SATA that you kicked off an indexing job on one day? Well shit now you have a terabyte of word/ppt docs sitting in your 15k stack. Most people ended turning this feature off and going back to managing storage allocation manually.

aychamo_aycono_sl said:

Hmm. Putting you applications on your slow HD seems like a bad idea, FW. Yeah, sorry, I don't agree. I'm fine with my OS taking some retarded app I used once and putting it on my slow disk, and taking that new app that use frequently and putting it on my fast disk. Again, you're taking a superior technology (Fusion Drive isn'tjusta SSHD, read about it, the OS plays a huge role) and belittling it because its possible to do a poorer job manually. Sure, I could use a whisk to make a milkshake, but I'd rather have my VitaMix do it or me (horribly gay analogy guy.)

Ie, I don'twantto fuck with that stuff. I can if I want to, but I don't want to fight with my computer.

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Well obviously if you can fit it all why not.. Start loading up a lot of games, photoshop, etc and it becomes a lot harder.

arkktheseaotter_sl said:

SSD use is OS + frequently used programs. Why would you put everything else on the mechanical drive? My SSD has Windows, itunes, games I play often and other shitand it's only an old 80gb X-25M. With some of the prices today on 256gb drives at like 180 bucks you could put almost everything on a SSD minus music and movies.

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No. Read the whole review. If you want to do Hybrid because you're the typical Apple user that views their computer as a toaster, this is the best solution. If you want the best performance and are willing to spend a neuron worth of thought and one second changing the drive letter during an install, a separate SSD and HD is the way to go. Functioning human brain > algorithm. Now when they can manage to get this product to a place where I can at least influence the algorithm decisions, or at least visualize where the data is at the current moment, then it will be interesting to the power user.

Great apple product for apple users who are handicapped to one internal HDD. Will suggest to my sisters asap.

Anandtech_sl said:

The real question is whether or not it's worth it. I'm personally a much bigger fan of going all solid state andmanuallysegmenting your large media files onto HDD arrays, but perhaps that's me being set in my ways (or just me being right, not sure which one). Fusion Drive doesn't do anything to mitigate the likelihood that a hard drive will likely fail sooner than a good SSD, whereas if you go with an internal SSD and external (Thunderbolt or USB 3.0) HDD RAID array you can control your destiny a bit better. Unfortunately, in situations where Fusion Drive is a choice, you don't often have that flexibility.

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aychamo_aycono_sl said:

FW, A++, excellent review of an Apple product you've never actually used! Nice packaging, would repeat!

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Yup, and it's great that I have that choice. I don't want MS word on my SSD, ever. Guess where your install of Photoshop will end up if you don't launch it every day with Fusion? That's right, your HD.

aychamo_aycono_sl said:

This is coming from the person who just wrote to install programs on their slow HD.

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That's actually a perfect analogy. Manuals do kick the shit out of automatics. I'll take my Z4 in manual over automatic any day of the week. Automatics are for women and old people.

aychamo_aycono_sl said:

"Fuck automatic transmissions! I can accelerate quicker and save more gas with a standard!!" Therefore my Fiat prices the same as your Mercedes is better!

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Not sure what's weak about it. You have the internet god of computer hardware reviews, Anandtech, state that a seperate SSD and HD is still better.

I'll make you a deal though. If thunderbolt beats out USB3 as the interplatform standard, and hybrid drives become the desktop HD of choice amongst PC power users, you can have this liberal come over to your place and wash your car and clean your guns.

aychamo_aycono_sl said:

Pretty weak arguments, FW. Watch in 2-3 years your Windows box will support this natively and you'll be using it without complaint. And you'll be transferring files back and forth to your Thunderbolt external raid storage once your budget motherboard supports it.

(somewhat kidding)

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aychamo, what you are talking about is SSD Caching which intel systems have done for years now (since z68) if you setup a small ssd + hdd. It intelligently moves your most used programs to the SSD. It's kinda a dumb thing now since SSD prices have come down. You can buy a 128 or 256GB drive and put all your shit on it other than media.

Not really, no.

I wouldn't say that it's useless to put a SSD in an older machine. I put one in a Dell laptop I had laying around. It's just a Core 2 Duo with 4gb's. It made a huge difference. Night and day difference, really.

aychamo_aycono_sl said:

Maybe. But that's the exact sort of bullshit a lot of people don't want to deal with. What advantage is there to fucking around with moving shit on harddrives manually instead of letting an intelligent operating system do it for you (and probably do a better job)?

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Thanks for illustrating so wonderfully how inept you are.