[OS X TeX] Fusion drives and typeset speed

[John Coxon]

Any drop in reliability is presumably because two hard drives are more likely to experience one failure. You need a backup with either a Fusion Drive or a standard HDD, so it's pretty academic either way. I haven't seen any articles claiming Fusion Drives are highly unreliable or very prone to data loss.



AnandTech (one of the best hardware criticism websites) wrote a pretty good explanation/review of the Fusion Drive, here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6679/a-month-with-apples-fusion-drive






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On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> You mean that a fusion drive is more likely to fail and/or if it fails it’s more likely to fail catastrophically?
> I would feel better about a pure hard drive setup if it were operating at 7200 rpm. It’s possible that a local independent authorized repair place would be able to replace the hard drive with a faster one without negating the warrantee.
> Richard
>> On Nov 24, 2014, at 11:18 PM, pbjacob <pbjacob86 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> I’m using a Mac mini with a 128GB SSD and a 500GB HDD too, but not in fusion drive mode. The two hard drives are working separately.
>> The OS X system and most softwares are installed on the SSD, and some of my datas are stored on the HDD. I think this way is better than the fusion drive way.
>> 
>> Based on the instruction from Apple, the location of the apps and datas are decided by the OS X system according to the frequency of the usage. >From the users’ point of view, everything is stored in a single hard drive, and the users never know exactly how the datas actually being stored and moved. 
>> 
>> What we can ensure is that if you use the TeX very frequently, the system will move your TeX system into the SSD, and you can obtain a very good performance due to the fast response of the SSD.
>> 
>> But I don’ really suggest fusion drive mode, because it’s not stable enough. Once there is something wrong with any one of your drive, you will lose all your datas.
>> 
>> pbjacob
>> 
>>> On Nov 25, 2014, at 12:34 PM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I’m looking at the Mac minis* and I’m wondering if fusion drives make a significant difference in terms of TeX typesetting speed. Does anyone know? The non-fusion drive is 5400 rpm, and the hard drive part of the fusion drive is also 5400 rpm. I don’t know if all those TeX files wind up on the 128 GB SSD part of the fusion drives. I would probably load one up with 16GB of RAM which in itself makes a big difference with some applications, but I’m not sure about TeX. (The other important app is Aperture, but that’s a question for another group …)
>>> 
>>> *I’m also thinking of the new Dell U2415 monitors which very positive reviews.
>>> 
>>> Richard Séguin
>>> 
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