It looks like good news for Aperture users. There's a post on ArsTechnica relating that Apple's new Fusion drive does indeed go well beyond simple caching and more importantly, operates at the block level. For Aperture users, this means that a Fusion drive will keep only the most used parts of an Aperture library on the fast SSD drive, whilst the rest of the Aperture library can reside on the 'other part' of the Fusion drive (a normal HDD).
The best news though, is that it appears that the Fusion drive will be accessible via any SSD/HDD set up. IOW, grow your own without having to buy a new iMac.
Grant
Grant,
Thanks for sharing that, and that’s exciting news. I skimmed the article and noticed that it said that you can create the fusion “RAID” using the command line version of diskutil, so I wonder if it’ll be available to regular users using the Disk Utility.app soon. That’d be very exciting and definitely be the excuse to remove my DVD-ROM drive and replace with an SSD. Pretty slick!
@PhotoJoseph
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Grant: so what might this mean for a failed HDD in a fusion setup? What might the scenario be for recovery/HDD replacement/recovery sequence?
Thanks.
Personally I’d wait until it’s got a GUI. And as Grant says, if a beta OS is about to come out, then hopefully we’ll learn more then.
@PhotoJoseph
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At this time Disk Utility doesn’t support Fusion drives. A new beta of MacOSX will be seeded to developers next week (10.8.3) so I expect we will learn quite quickly if there is a new version in there which does provide support.
The lack of Disk Utility compatibility precludes Fusion for the faint of heart at this time, but I have no doubt, since it is based on a Core technology of the MacOS, that it will be widely available at some time in the future. This is just a guess of course. As it stands, if you have a data problem on the Fusion drive, you will not be able to repair the drive with Disk Utility. Having good backups makes this a lot less scary.