Unlike traditional SSD caching architectures, Fusion Drive isn’t actually a cache. Subsequent system and backup restores on your Mac with FD will maintain the Fusion Drive facade, even if you’ve purposefully destroyed the array. When you buy a Fusion Drive equipped Mac, Apple does everything for you. If you have multiple drives you can create a Fusion Drive yourself using some simple Terminal commands. The creation of a Fusion Drive is simple. First introduced in Lion, Core Storage is a logical volume manager that allows the OS to treat multiple physical disks as a single volume.Īpple originally used Core Storage to enable full disk encryption in Lion, but its use has been expanded to Fusion Drive in Mountain Lion. This isn’t simply Intel’s Smart Response Technology running under an Apple brand, instead we’re looking at virtualized storage courtesy of OS X’s Core Storage. Right off the bat Fusion Drive is different than most of the hybrid/caching solutions we’ve seen, but where it really diverges from the norm is in the software component. While I would’ve personally picked something like the Link A Media or Intel S3700 controller due to their excellent performance consistency, the PM830 is probably a more proven and/or affordable option for Apple. In the case of Apple’s Fusion Drive, Samsung’s PM830 continues to be one of the best combinations of performance and reliability we’ve ever tested. Most OEMs ship with 8 - 24GB of NAND, and even then the drives rarely use a good controller. The size of the SSD used in Apple’s Fusion Drive is much larger than what we usually find in a caching setup. For my testing I used a 1TB Fusion Drive in a 27-inch iMac. In the Mac minis this SSD is a 2.5” drive, while in the iMacs it’s the same custom interface that’s used in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with Retina Display. In all of these cases, the Fusion Drive is a combination of a 1TB or 3TB hard drive (2.5” or 3.5”) and a 128GB Samsung PM830 based SSD.

The 1TB option is only available on the upgraded Mac mini ($799) or any of the iMacs, while the 3TB Fusion Drive is a 27-inch iMac exclusive. In true Apple fashion there are only two Fusion Drive configurations available: 1TB and 3TB. Available as a build-to-order option on both the new Mac mini and the new iMac is Apple’s own take on SSD caching, Fusion Drive.

Apple 1tb fusion hard drive for imac