Looks like Fusion drive will work on older macs as well though likely to be fairly time consuming to setup as it would require reinstalling/restoring of Mac OSX 10.8.2
It will probably make more sense to have an SSD individually as it is faster by itself. Delegating the larger chunks of your data to the mechanical drive and your system and applications to the SSD is still the best solution, in my opinion. That said, I can see the appeal of the Fusion drive.
__________________ ACMT Mac mini (Mid 2011) 2.7 GHz i7, 8GB RAM, Crucial M4 256GB SSD + 500GB + 1TB FW800 OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini iPhone 4S • iPod nano 8GB • Sound System Audio Engine A2 • Display UltraSharp U2412M 24"
My current setup is this exactly. In addition to the fact it is rather inconvenient having 2 separate volumes, I have an issue that somewhat frequently happens in that the HDD will spin down (only infrequently used stuff is on it), this can cause a several second delay when you do finally do hit something that is on it and it needs to spin up... I'm not 100% certain but I think the "put hard disks to sleep when possible" setting under system prefs -> energy saver could help with this, but then the HDD would never spin down and I would like it to over night, and/or during the day when I'm away.... sounds like what I might really need would be a setting to adjust how quickly after the HDD drive is no longer being used it spins down.
My only real worry about the fusion drive is that with more parts to fail(HDD) or run out of r/w cycles(SDD) it may be prone to a higher failure rate than either SDD's or HDD's alone...
That said the draw of just having one big volume, with most of the speed benefit of SDD's and the capacity benefit of HDD's is VERY appealing to me...
I'm not 100% certain but I think the "put hard disks to sleep when possible" setting under system prefs -> energy saver could help with this, but then the HDD would never spin down and I would like it to over night, and/or during the day when I'm away....
Regardless of that setting in System Preferences, the HDD spins down when the unit is put to sleep. Overnight or when you're away from the computer, do you put the Mac to sleep? That said, I have my drive set to never spin down, and my computer is never put to sleep - it may shorten the life of the drive, but eliminating the delay and lag of allowing that drive to spin down and then spin back up after it has been idle is worth the trade off.
__________________ ACMT Mac mini (Mid 2011) 2.7 GHz i7, 8GB RAM, Crucial M4 256GB SSD + 500GB + 1TB FW800 OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini iPhone 4S • iPod nano 8GB • Sound System Audio Engine A2 • Display UltraSharp U2412M 24"
Regardless of that setting in System Preferences, the HDD spins down when the unit is put to sleep. Overnight or when you're away from the computer, do you put the Mac to sleep? That said, I have my drive set to never spin down, and my computer is never put to sleep - it may shorten the life of the drive, but eliminating the delay and lag of allowing that drive to spin down and then spin back up after it has been idle is worth the trade off.
I use basically the same Energy Saver settings and maybe the new Fusion drive is different, but even when I have the 'put hard disks to sleep when possible' disabled (unchecked), they still seem to spin down after about two-three hours of non use or access.
And I was always led to believe that normal hard drives last longer when just left spinning, and any full spin down-spin spin-up option is just not to be I guess with the OS X settings.
Maybe it's so that Apple can conform to and qualify for the five star Energy Saving approval certificate they get for their Macs????
I never put it to sleep. I've personally never really seen the point of sleep on a desktop where you aren't faced with the same constraint of trying to conserve battery power. I've changed the hard drive spin down setting, hopefully that will solve my issue on that front, but I still think I may experiment with setting up a fusion drive at some point in the not to distant future. I'm figuring it'll take a weekend when you factor in all the backing up and restoring of data...
My thinking behind why the fusion drive would spin down less is the the os is doing a fair bit of copying files back and forth between the sdd and hdd in the background as it is deciding what is used frequently.
automatic offloading less accessed data on a slower drive. This technology has been around and recently (2-3 years?) been implemented on consumer level HDD.
Dell Equallogics iSCSI SAN does this with 2 or more SAN. It is able to offload less used data on a SAN with slower disks..
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Macbook 6.1 - Core 2 Duo 2.26Ghz, 8gb ram, 500gb 7200rpm HD
Mac Mini 1.1 - Core 2 Duo 2.16Ghz, 2gb ram, 320gb 7200rpm HD
though likely to be fairly time consuming to setup as it would require reinstalling/restoring of Mac OSX 10.8.2
Linear Mode
