Fusion Drive

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Fusion Drive is a technology developed by Apple for computers , with which an SSD and a mechanical hard drive are connected to form a logical drive. It is a further development of hybrid drives . With the latter, the SSD part serves as a data buffer, and all data is always stored on the mechanical disk. With Fusion Drive, on the other hand, the SSD serves as a fully-fledged part of the logical drive (except for a small part of 4 GB, which also serves as a buffer here). In contrast to hybrid drives, Fusion Drive is a pure software solution.

Description and function

Apple describes Fusion Drive as a technology in which an SSD and a mechanical hard drive are transparently connected to form a logical drive. The user sees the combination as a single drive . With Fusion Drive, you should be able to benefit from the speed of the SSD at a moderate price even with large storage volumes.

Fusion Drive not only combines two physical drives into one logical drive, but also uses a technology called tiering . Frequently accessed data is stored on the fastest drive (here the SSD), the rest on the slower one, here on the mechanical disk. The operating system itself decides which data is stored where on the basis of constant analysis of the data access and cannot be influenced by the user. If necessary, the operating system rearranges data in the background. The operating system itself is always on the SSD. Tiering has been used in mainframes for some time, and Fusion Drive is the first to use this method in a personal computer.

Fusion Drive has been integrated into all new Macs with SSD and mechanical hard drives since November 2012. The first corresponding Macs were equipped with a 128 GB SSD and a 1 TB or 3 TB mechanical hard drive. Currently (July 2017) Apple does not provide a utility that can be used to install Fusion Drive on older Macs. However, this is possible via the terminal, the prerequisite for this is at least OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion .

Since MacOS 10.13 High Sierra , Apple has been using the new APFS file system, which replaces the previous HFS + . APFS is not compatible with Fusion Drives up to macOS 10.13 High Sierra; HFS + is then retained when the system is updated. This changed with macOS 10.14 Mojave , which automatically migrates a Fusion Drive to APFS.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jan Tißler: iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, Fusion Drive: Apple in Flash fever. October 23, 2012, accessed February 24, 2013 .
  2. ↑ a b Anand Lal Shimpi on 10/24/2012: Understanding Apple's Fusion Drive. AnandTech, October 24, 2012, accessed February 24, 2013 .
  3. ↑ Max Zellmer: Fusion Drive from Apple: What is it actually? October 26, 2012, accessed February 24, 2013 .
  4. ↑ Lee Hutchinson: Apple Fusion Drive — wait, what? How does this work? In: Ars Technica. Condé-Nast , October 23, 2012, accessed February 24, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Semmelrocc: Set up Fusion Drive on older Macs. November 4, 2012, accessed February 25, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Johannes Schuster: New iMacs with extremely slim lines. October 23, 2012, accessed February 13, 2014 .
  7. ↑ Andreas Lenz: Create a Fusion Drive yourself - Here's how. March 17, 2014, accessed August 17, 2016 .