Lab Tests: Pushing a Fusion Drive to its limits
Apple’s new Fusion Drive is pretty nifty. It sets out to give users the capacity of a hard drive along with the speed of a solid-state drive. Fusion Drive works as advertised for what most of us do, most of the time.
As seen in our Speedmark 8 performance tests of a BTO Mac mini, the Fusion Drive, made up of a 120GB SSD and 1TB hard drive, was on par with standard SSD speeds in photo imports, file duplication, and unzipping of files.
But what happens when you push the limits of the Fusion Drive? To find out, we set up a test that copied twenty 10GB files, one at a time. We tracked the time it took to move each file from internal storage to external storage, and from the external back to the internal. We copied files and tracked the speed until the copied completed, or in the case of the SSD, until it reached full capacity. We then ran a similar test with twenty 10GB folders, each containing 7421 individual files.
We used a Promise Pegasus six-drive RAID 5 as our external drive, connected via Thunderbolt to a 2.3GHz quad-core Core i7 Mac mini with a Fusion Drive. We ran the tests using the Fusion Drive, and then we separated the 120GB SSD and the 1TB 5400-rpm hard drive that comprise the Fusion Drive and ran the tests on those drives individually. What we found was that the Fusion Drive kept up with the SSD in these sustained tests—right until the SSD portion filled up.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2017365/lab-tests-pushing-a-fusion-drive-to-its-limits.html
