In this blog, we will take a closer look at the fusion drive and explain just why it is one to avoid. However, the hybrid drive is far from perfect and just like most products, has its drawbacks.

When the fusion drive was first announced they were significantly cheaper than a full SSD device and gave you faster boot time and plenty of storage space. First announced in 2012, fusion drives are available in select Mac and iMac models. I'd love to specifically hear from those with experience moving from a fusion drive to an SSD and whether you actually saw enough performance boost to justify spending additional $270 for half the storage? If you did see a noticalble improvement, under what workflows did it seem to matter most and wrere didn't you notice much difference? Thanks in advance.Apple’s fusion drive is a hybrid drive that offers the best of both worlds, combining flash storage and hard drive storage in one. I'm torn between just staying with the Base 2TB fusion (and hoping the 128GB SSD will be sufficient for the OS and common apps to see signifigant performance boost, or go with a smaller pure SSD (for $270) or upgrade to a bigger 3TD Fusion drive ($90 upgrade). If I wanted to go with pure SSD I can upgrade (or downgrade depending on your point of view) to a 1 TB SSD for $270, or I could upgrade to a bigger (3TB) fusion for only $90. That 128GB of SSD seems pretty good compared to the 1TB fusion drive that only has 32GB SSD. This configuaration comes with a 2TB fusion drive that has 128GB SSD built in included in the price. There is an upgrade to a Radeon Pro Vega 48 but that's over $400 and based on comparisons I've seen, I don't think I'll go that route for my uses. The base Graphics Card is Radeon Pro 580X with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. The base memory is 8GB which is what I'll get as I will upgrade to an additional 64GB via OWC. The system I think I've settled on is the 3.6GHz i9 (8-core processor).

Being retired military I can use the 'Veterans and Military' area and get a discount. For my uses (Lightroom, Photoshop, Screeflow, etc) it is (barely) adequate, but it's starting to seem long in the tooth.Īs I have a birthday coming up, I have decided it's time to upgrade. I currently have a 2011 27' iMac with 4-core 2.7GHz i5 processor and a 1TB mechanical (non-fusion) drive.

Imac fusion drive vs ssd vs hdd