When Apple announced the iPad Mini and iPad 4, one announcement went fairly unnoticed. It was the brand new iMac. Apple brought its A game when designing this beautiful all in one. Naturally it comes with the most up to date hardware as well. Apart from the usual CPU and GPU based hardware, Apple added a little bit of its own home made magic. It’s the fusion drive.
Techfast Lunch&Dinner got their hands on the new Mac Mini and took the fusion drive for a spin. How did this hybrid hard drive + SSD storage work? Extremely impressive. Their tests found the Fusion Drive Mac mini started in just 15.7 seconds, while the 2012 Mac mini with a traditional hard drive took 34.1 seconds to start. Fusion Drive can also achieve write speeds of more than 300 MB/s, and write speeds of 400 MB/s. In comparison, the Mac mini with 5400-rpm drive fails to exceed exceed 100 MB/s on either the read or write test.
This fusion drive is found on both the upcoming iMac and the new Mac Mini. It features 128 gigabytes of flash storage paired with either a 1-terabyte or 3-terabyte 5400-rpm hard drive. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion operating system calculates which files and applications are used the most and automatically places them on the faster solid-state drive