Please stop the madness: Apple Mac’s Fusion Drive is not about caching

“There was some hubbub surrounding the release of machines with Apple’s Fusion Drive Core Storage-based management software,” David Morgenstern reports for ZDNet. “And much confusion. The word ‘caching’ crept into the stories and posts. The caching label appears to be sticking and that is incorrect.”

Morgenstern reports, “I ran a search for ‘Fusion Drive’ and ‘caching’ and found plenty of recent stories that describe the Fusion Drive as managing caching for a performance boost… Not caching. Tiering.”

Read more in the full article here.

Related articles:
Apple’s new Fusion Drive technology also works on older Macs – October 31, 2012
Apple’s new patented Fusion Drive is more advanced than you might think – October 24, 2012

24 Comments

        1. I’m glad to see you trolling as a real, logged in human being, trondude. But it’s still trolling.

          AND you obviously haven’t bothered to do your homework regarding the point of having BOTH an HD and an SSD. Please toddle along and look it up.

        2. Oh and, while you’re studying Apple’s fusion drive systems, be sure to look up the following two terms, both of which help explain why Apple Mac computers continue to be the CHEAPEST PCs on the market. You get what you pay for:

          1) ROI: Return on Investment. Macs beat PCs on ROI every time.

          2) TCO: Total Cost of Ownership. Shelf price is never the total cost of a computer. The TCO for Macs is consistently lower than any comparable PC. IOW: Watch out for that Windows PC tax gotcha!

        3. So are you going to attempt to refute trondude’s point with accurate facts and analysis or not?

          Personally, I think he has a point. Which is why all our Mac Pros are fitted with Mercury SSDs for their startup volumes and conventional hard drives for mass storage. If Apple cared about giving its customers significantly more flexibility, it would have offered an iMac with two drive bays that could be fitted with whatever the customer desired. Sadly, Apple chose to limit its configuration options, and it continues to ruthlessly gouge customers for RAM.

          …and you wonder why more users don’t select the Mac? Because of lack of config options!!!

        4. @ Tired one: On your suggestion, perhaps our next machines will be Hackintoshes. Depends on whether Apple updates the Pro or not.

          If Apple doesn’t want to attract potential switchers — let alone long-time Mac productivity users like me — and assholes like you just like to insult anything that disagrees with your religious position, why bother giving Apple my money, or you my time of day? Grow up.

        5. Religion has nothing to do with it, you barbaric heathen. I’m not insulting you because of my “position”, I’m insulting you because you’re a whiny twit. Oh yeah, config this!

        6. FYI..dude, I am no troll. I simply like my macs to have the most performance they can…so if I was in the market, I would configure my new iMac with the 768GB SSD, and buy an external thunderbolt 1 TB drive for storage. You can have the fusion drive. I understand how it works just fine, but its not for me. No fusion drive will beat a SSD for speed.. The extra cost doesn’t bother me, but that is just me. Got it?

    1. You still don’t understand the premise, do you?

      Fusion Drives are for increasing capacity above what SSD can provide while giving some speed advantage over conventional mechanical storage.

  1. The thing is that how this gizmo works internally is technically complex enough that its far, far beyond the ability of most people to understand – especially tech writers dashing off stories.

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