[Macworld]

Post your comments for Lab Tests: Pushing a Fusion Drive to its limits here

[JMHammer]

I've had my Mac Mini for all of two days so far (replacing a mid-2007 20" iMac) and I'm extremely impressed. Booting and launch of all my usual applications seems to be at full SSD speed, since the OS seems to have already decided that all that "stuff" belongs on the SSD portion of the volume. The SSD portion of my Fusion Drive is completely full minus the 4gb or so that the OS keeps free (and the HDD has about 200gb more), but I don't commonly copy files in the 4gb range or larger so I haven't seen anything less than SSD-speed except when I launch a less-commonly-used application or access a large data file that I haven't yet used enough for the OS to decide to needs to get moved from the HDD portion to the SSD portion.

Of course, my new Mini also has four times the RAM and a much more modern processor than my old iMac, so certainly that is also affecting my subjective impression of the reads/writes with my Fusion Drive.

[ingus]

I want to commend you on some very well done work. Conclusion? The Fusion drive adds the convenience of a single drive (not to be underestimated), otherwise the results are exactly what you would expect from keeping the drives separate. The capacity of the SSD is the determining factor.

Myself, I run SSD only (from 240-480 GB). I keep my movies on an external USB3.

[bugjuice]

My partner bought the new base model Mac Mini, and even for her light stuff, it's been impressive. Has fallen victim to the HDMI problem tho, being plugged in to the TV via it.. Shame, it's actual only main fault really..

[BreZel]

Quote

I've had my Mac Mini for all of two days so far (replacing a mid-2007 20" iMac) and I'm extremely impressed. Booting and launch of all my usual applications seems to be at full SSD speed, since the OS seems to have already decided that all that "stuff" belongs on the SSD portion of the volume. The SSD portion of my Fusion Drive is completely full minus the 4gb or so that the OS keeps free (and the HDD has about 200gb more), but I don't commonly copy files in the 4gb range or larger so I haven't seen anything less than SSD-speed except when I launch a less-commonly-used application or access a large data file that I haven't yet used enough for the OS to decide to needs to get moved from the HDD portion to the SSD portion. Of course, my new Mini also has four times the RAM and a much more modern processor than my old iMac, so certainly that is also affecting my subjective impression of the reads/writes with my Fusion Drive.

How can you check how much space is taken on the ssd and on the hdd ? Special Programm ?

[CharlesParente]

But what about disk read speeds?
How does Fusion perform on reads if the data is stored on the SATA portion, compared to a 'normal' SATA drive?

Does the 4GB SSD buffer go both ways??