#2017 IMAC FUSION DRIVE VS SSD PRO#

The system acted like everything was on SSD, though, and I knew when I was going to have to wait for slow disk access. iTunes, of course, sucked, but that's to be expected. I'll save up longer and wait to buy the machine to get a real SSD.Īn SSD will really speed up your 2011 MacBook Pro.īefore I did the Fusion Drive, I had the OS and apps on SSD and my iTunes library and other media on platters. Point is: if there's any chance the experience will be like that, even if only for some of the time.no. The other day, all I had to do was print an attachment from an email, and it took literally 20 minutes (wait for it to wake from sleep, wait for my email app to launch, wait for the attachment to open in Preview, wait for the print utility to launch, etc.). The 2011 is so frustrating to use that I want to throw it out a window.

#2017 IMAC FUSION DRIVE VS SSD PRO#

I recently moved from a 2015 retina MacBook Pro (with an SSD, obviously) to a 2011 MacBook Pro with a spinning disk (the rMBP was my work machine, but I changed jobs and had to return it. Now that I think about it some more.I don't really know why I'm even considering it. I'm using ~190 GB on my current drive, so 24 GB is only 12% of that – and that's not counting that macOS itself takes up 10 or 12 GB itself, right? So basically that only gives me like 10 GB for apps and stuff. Hm, yeah, I hadn't really thought about how the SSD portion is only 24 GB. And given you're limited to a 24GB or 128GB SSD, unless *all* of your apps and essential data fits within that limitation, you'll be hitting the HDD regularly.

Mine boots in 27 seconds and the computer just runs beautiful now.Once you hit the HDD, it'll suck, thanks to the bottom-tier 5400 rpm drives Apple uses. “I strapped a Samsung T5 to the stand and installed Catalina on it. “Absolutely love my 2013,” a YouTube commenter responded to my video. Keep the old machine and add an external solid state drive just for the operating system.

Ultimately, if you’re in the market for an iMac, you will have to spend the extra cash for the Fusion drive if you want good performance. a 2013 iMac 2.7 GHz quad-core Intel i5.Īnd that is a bad experience for new iMac owners.

But it felt just as slow as our old iMac. It had a 3.6 GHz quad-core Intel i3 processor with retina screen. I tested an iMac with a Fusion drive in an Apple Store, and it booted in probably less than a third of the time of the iMac I had bought.Īnd it wasn’t the cheapest iMac Apple offers: it was about $1,800 Canadian, or almost $1,400 USD. Fusion drives have a small solid-state drive for commonly-accessed files and quick startups. The odd thing is that Apple still sells iMacs without one.Īpple does offer what it calls a “Fusion drive,” which offers the best of both worlds. They do, however, make booting up and other disk-intensive tasks much quicker. Solid-state drives are much faster - up to eight times faster at accessing data - but they’re much more expensive. Traditional hard drives are cheap but slow. Ultimately, both machines are slow, and both machines are slow because they use old-fashioned spinning hard drives, not solid-state drives. The new machine was the clear winner in opening Apple’s Podcast app, however. That spinning beach ball came up on the new machine doing nothing more than closing System Preferences. your Mac’s way of telling you it’s busy, working hard and overburdened. One thing that should never come up on a brand-new Apple machine is the spinning beach ball of death.

2017 imac fusion drive vs ssd