SSD and HDD questions

[mathman]

I have a 2012 Mac-mini with the 2.3 i7 and 16 gigs ram with the stock 5400 rpm 1TB drive. I was able to buy a 480 gb SSD drive for a great price so I am going to install the drive this week. I am trying to decide which way to go. Fusion Drive or keep drives separate.

I am even considering replacing the 5400 1TB drive with a 7200 rpm drive while I am at it. I use Logic X which IK and NI plugins and Oceanway drums and others through infinite player.
I also do a lot of photoshop and Final Cut Pro X video.

Any advice? I was originally thinking going separate with the drives. I can easily keep my boot drive at around 300 gb or less but will it really make much difference over the fusion drive setup. Especially if I switch the 5400 rpm drive to 7200?
Anyone setup a fusion drive? Happy with it?

Thanks.

[Victor (Fret Friend)]

With the SSD, your Mac will fly like hot shit off a greasy shovel! Setting the SSD up with your OS and slaving your HDD for all your data will give you ultimate performance. That would be my choice but I'm a simple fella me

[cynic]

Not really a fusion drive, but I installed a 1TB Seagate SSHD 7200 "hybrid" drive in an early 2008 2.66 Core 2 Duo iMac a few weeks back and the results were pretty impressive. The SSHD is a 1TB HDD with 8gb of flash memory that acts like an SSD. Boot time with 10.6.8 was 23 seconds, shutdown was 4. Installing El Capitan slowed things by about 5 seconds on each end. The freshly installed SSHD is still slower than my 250gb SSD in a 1.7Ghz i5 Macbook Air, but plenty fast none-the-less. I passed the iMac on to my mom pretty quickly so I can't speak to how it handles work tasks.

For the price of a 1tb 7200 drive and the mini dual-drive kit, it makes good sense to update while you've got it open. Seeing the difference in just the boot times was enough to make me think about updating my 2009 iMac.

Ha, one thing I really like about Mac is that they last long enough to make using model years relevant

[scottcald]

The fusion drive will cache whatever is used most often on the SSD. So, it should come out faster because even your most used docs etc. will get cached there. I don't recall exactly the parameters for when something gets put back onto the Hard drive, but folks I know who've done this are happy with it.

If you do go the separate drive route, put an admin account on the SSD, then put YOUR home folder on the hard drive. That way you can still boot the machine if the hard drive goes south.

Some folks will put their home folder on the SSD, then just put their iTunes and photo libraries on the hard disk. I prefer to keep home folder contents in one place.

Since it's all done in software, you could set up Fusion, try it for a while, back it up and separate it later if you don't like it.

[gorch]

A SSHD lives from the SSD cache size. If you are working on a narrow path it'll keep the cache stable and run in full speed. Otherwise it'll have to backload from the HD.

At the age of about 6 years I had replaced the HD on the notebook by a SSD. I managed to keep all OS and data on the SSD. That was just maginicient. Its about 8 years now and still working flawlessly. But has been replaced by a new number cruncher for audio procesing. With the new notebook I have split drives. Large data goes to the HD. It's all working well.

[mathman]

I decided to go the Fusion route.

I put it in today. $137 total for the OWC kit and the 480 GB SSD drive.

Very nice.

[scottcald]

I decided to go the Fusion route.

I put it in today. $137 total for the OWC kit and the 480 GB SSD drive.

Very nice.

Nice. I love seeing those big numbers in read and write functions.