The Fusion Drive was offered as an option with the introduction of the Late 2012 iMac and Mac mini, it has not been offered as an option for the MacBooks. Which models have Fusion Drive and how do they differ? In addition to the increase in performance, as solid-state storage is relatively expensive compared to hard drive storage it allows for a cost effective way to have a faster drive with a large amount of storage space without it being prohibitively expensive. This way the faster solid-state drive’s better performance is efficiently leveraged.Ī practical example of this would be that all of the operating system files are stored on the solid-state drive to reduce loading times when booting or opening applications. Most commonly accessed files are dynamically allocated to the solid-state drive portion of the drive, whereas less commonly accessed files are kept on the hard drive portion. MacOS combines these two drives so that to the user it appears as a single drive. How does it work and what are the benefits? Solid-state drives have higher performance than hard drives and by combining the two it increases the overall performance. Fusion Drive is Apple’s name for a hybrid storage drive consisting of a hard drive and a solid-state drive.
