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With the announcement of a new Apple product, there’s always some sort of marketing term created by Apple to describe or name a new feature, product, or service. Today’s event wasn’t any different and when Apple unveiled their new iMacs with Fusion Drive, many heads turned and asked “what’s that?” Because Apple flew through their presentation today, I was confused and didn’t really understand the purpose of the Fusion Drive, so I did what any sensible person in my position would do and looked it up after the keynote was over…and the technology is really neat, but it is definitely not an idea that’s brand spankin’ new.
In the world of computer storage, we have the old traditional means of storing files on our machines with hard disc drives (HDD). HDD are drives with discs inside them, which spin when powered on. These “discs” are very fragile and can be disturbed and destroyed with the slightest bump, drop, or wrong environment settings. Because these drives are compiled with moving parts, they’re typically not as fast as newer storage types and they’re not as energy efficient as types of storage that don’t have to take up excess energy to power their parts.
HDD prices have fallen dramatically in the past few years. A 1 terabyte hard drive can now be had for around $65-85, depending on where you shop. Two years ago, the same drive would have cost around $100-130. Because these parts have gotten so cheap, PC manufacturers are starting to provide their customers with bigger drives right out of the box, but that can also be credited to the rising size of applications and operating systems, as well as consumers’ sudden proclivity for digital media hoarding.
Now that we’re starting to see manufacturers strive to build the thinnest, lightest, yet powerful notebooks, a new storage trend is starting and that’s flash memory. The idea of flash memory is a lot easier to understand. Take thumb drives, for instance, and maybe even the device that you’re reading this article on. Our cellphones, tablets, thumb drives, and cameras all use flash based memory. Instead of drives with moving parts, flash memory drives are simply chips that transfer information digitally. They’re less power hungry, faster, reduce noise, and dramatically speed up simple tasks like boot time and application launching. When flash memory is used in a notebook or any type of computer, it’s named a Solid State Drive (SSD). SSDs are still fairly new, and because of that, they’re still fairly expensive. A really good SSD drive can cost around $200-500, for very little amounts of storage, which hasn’t really made the SSD a practical choice when consumer choose their storage preference in a new computer.
That’s where the hybrid drive and Apple’s freshly dubbed “Fusion Drive” enter the scene. What the Fusion Drive does is blend together a 128GB flash memory chip with a 1TB or 3TB HDD to give the user the speedy benefits of the Solid State Drive, as well as the storage capacity of a traditional hard drive. According to Apple, the files that you use most often will be kept fresh in the 128GB of flash memory, as well as operating system files and applications, like iTunes, Mail, etc. This allows for lightning fast file retrieval, which will speed up the process of computing on Apple’s new iMacs, without causing a detrimental loss to storage space in the end.
