A Month with Apple's Fusion Drive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 18, 2013 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Mac
- SSDs
- Apple
- SSD Caching
- Fusion Drive
Fusion Drive: Under the Hood
I took the 27-inch iMac out of the box and immediately went to work on Fusion Drive testing. I started filling the drive with a 128KB sequential write pass (queue depth of 1). Using iStat Menus 4 to actively monitor the state of both drives I noticed that only the SSD was receiving this initial write pass. The SSD was being written to at 322MB/s with no activity on the HDD.
After 117GB of writes the HDD took over, at speeds of roughly 133 - 175MB/s to begin with.
The initial test just confirmed that Fusion Drive is indeed spanning the capacity of both drives. The first 117GB ended up on the SSD and the remaining 1TB of writes went directly to the HDD. It also gave me the first indication of priority: Fusion Drive will try to write to the SSD first, assuming there's sufficient free space (more on this later).
Next up, I wanted to test random IO as this is ultimately where SSDs trump hard drives in performance and typically where SSD caching or hybrid hard drives fall short. I first tried the worst case scenario, a random write test that would span all logical block addresses. Given that the total capacity of the Fusion Drive is 1.1TB, how this test was handled would tell me a lot about how Apple maps LBAs (Logical Block Addresses) between the two drives.
The results were interesting and not unexpected. Both the SSD and HDD saw write activity, with more IOs obviously hitting the hard drive (which consumes a larger percentage of all available LBAs). The average 4KB (QD16) random write performance was around 0.51MB/s, it was constrained by the hard drive portion of the Fusion Drive setup.
After stopping the random write task however, there was immediate moving of data between the HDD and SSD. Since the LBAs were chosen at random, it's possible that some (identical or just spatially similar) addresses were picked more than once and those blocks were immediately marked for promotion to the SSD. This was my first experience with the Fusion Drive actively moving data between drives.
A full span random write test is a bit unfair for a consumer SSD, much less a hybrid SSD/HDD setup with roughly an 1:8 ratio of LBAs. To get an idea of how good Fusion Drive is at dealing with random IO I constrained the random write test to the first 8GB of LBAs.
The resulting performance was quite different. For the first pass, average performance was roughly 7 - 9MB/s, with most of the IO hitting the SSD and a smaller portion hitting the hard drive. After the 3 minute test, I waited while the Fusion Drive moved data around, then repeated it. For the second run, total performance jumped up to 21.9MB/s with more of the IO being moved to the SSD although the hard drive was still seeing writes.
In the shot to the left, most random writes are hitting the SSD but some are still going to the HDD, after some moving of data and remapping of LBAs nearly all random writes go to the SSD and performance is much higher
On the third attempt, nearly all random writes went to the SSD with performance peaking at 98MB/s and dropping to a minimum of 35MB/s as the SSD got more fragmented. This told me that Apple seems to dynamically map LBAs to the SSD based on frequency of access, a very pro-active approach to ensuring high performance. Ultimately this is a big difference between standard SSD caches and what Fusion Drive appears to be doing. Most SSD caches seem to work based on frequency of read access, whereas Fusion Drive appears to (at least partially) take into account what LBAs are frequently targeted for writes and mapping those to the SSD.
Note that subsequent random write tests produced very different results. As I filled up the Fusion Drive with more data and applications (~80% full of real data and applications), I never saw random write performance reach these levels again. After each run I'd see short periods where data would move around, but random IO hit the Fusion Drive in around an 7:1 ratio of HDD to SSD accesses. Given the capacity difference between the drives, this ratio makes a lot of sense. If you have a workload that is composed of a lot of random writes that span all available space, Fusion Drive isn't for you. Given that most such workloads are confined to the enterprise space, that shouldn't really be a concern here.
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Galatian - Friday, January 18, 2013 - link
Thanks for pointing this out! I was very interested in getting a new iMac, as I love working on my 13" rMBP, but since I still like to game I really wanted to use the SSD on bootcamp as well. It is a huge step backward for all those people who want/need bigger SSDs. The only other option Apple offers is the 768 GB version for a whopping 1300€ upgrade price. There is no other size in between. Apple has lost me on that one.BrooksT - Friday, January 18, 2013 - link
So Apple is charging $150 to take away the headache of managing files. What you call "gouging" is what many people call "charging for a service."Death666Angel - Friday, January 18, 2013 - link
Again I have to wonder what you do with your PC. It appears as though you have no idea what is on your PC, because even saving a .doc in a specific folder is "managing files". Do you just save everything to desktop? Or download everything from the cloud and then start it from the browser download window?name99 - Friday, January 18, 2013 - link
And I wonder if you have EVER actually(a) viewed how NORMAL people use computers,
(b) used a Mac more recently than ten years ago.
Apple realized a long time ago that people has MASSIVE difficulty dealing with the file system and naming/finding files. Practically every large advance in Apple tech has been to deal with this.
iTunes and iPhoto are about dealing with "songs" and "photos", not "song files" and "photo files". Both create an environment where you never have to give a damn about where your songs and photos are stored or named in the file system. iPod follows the same path, and iOS is the logical endpoint, with no user visible file system.
And this is not new --- did you EVER expect that you should have to manually organized your email files into folders?
In OSX Apple first tried to simplify things with automatically provided folders for the most common situations (Documents, Downloads, Music, Movies, Pictures).
Now, in Mountain Lion Apple is, through a combination of different features (version storage, automatically opening apps at reboot, auto-storing files in iCloud) trying to make it so that, more and more you don't have to name documents created in apps like TextEdit. You CAN, but you don't HAVE TO.
Insisting on manually controlling the placement of your files really does start to come across as no different from insisting on writing assembly code.
Look, I'm not an idiot. I have multiple external hard drives connected to my multiple machines, and I have a purpose for the different hard drives.
The difference between you and me is that I'm not so deluded as to imagine that my needs are in any way typical, and that everyone else would be better off being forced to do things like me.
Death666Angel - Friday, January 18, 2013 - link
I see how other people use PCs. They are managing their stuff, even if they just put documents in a document folder, photos in a photo folder etc. I don't even know what not managing files would look like. Hence why I asked.I don't use Apple products.
I manually organize my Emails to folders in Thunderbird.
I also don't use the Windows libraries or the media player library or any of that stuff. I have no found a program that gave me the ability to organize "non-files" (songs, photos etc.) in a way I found easy to use, well arranged etc. I also like my files to be program/OS independent.
I don't think I'm the typical user. I never said as much.
Your last point though tells me that you don't understand the meaning of my post here. Read the other post that I did not replying to anyone. That should make it clear that I am against this technology. But if someone says he is not managing files, that just sounds dumb (real world equivalent: I don't clean up my closet and have no idea where what is).
KoolAidMan1 - Friday, January 18, 2013 - link
So many spergs in tech forums, it is unbelievable.I'm certain that most of you have low level autism and have no idea how people in the real world are.
Death666Angel - Friday, January 18, 2013 - link
I' pretty sure I'm not. What I am sure of, though, is that you are a dick. :Pkyuu - Saturday, January 19, 2013 - link
People who do the simplest management of their files (saving photos to a Photos folder, music to a Music folder, etc.) have "low-level autism"?The argument that basic file management is hard or a "headache" is absurd. It takes no time at all, and managing files and apps between an SSD and an HDD is no more difficult or time consuming than that.
KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, January 19, 2013 - link
Nope. See this is what I'm talking about.It isn't about lack of technical knowledge, it is about lack of EMPATHY.
Just because you or I or anyone around here can manually manage things doesn't mean that we should bash on automated solutions for normals. I used to write custom config.sys and batch files to get my DOS games to run properly 20 years ago, but I did it because I wanted to play the game, not because I enjoyed jumping through technical hoops.
I'm sure if you told some nerd back in 1993 that maintenance of their games from both the download service and the operating system would be the norm in 20 years, they'd bash on it for not being "hardcore" enough.
Jumping through technical hoops is nothing, you're right, its easy. It also isn't something to hold over the heads of people who don't want to go through that work.
Again, empathy, something so many insecure tech geeks are lacking when it comes to thinking about technology and products.
Galatian - Sunday, January 20, 2013 - link
Apple isn't gauging 150$. They are charging you 250€ for a 128 GB SSD! 250€ = 333$ at the current rate. Not to mention the fact, they simply don't have anything in between. It's either 128GB SSD or 766GB.I'm not sure why everybody is so apologetic about Apple on this one. They gave you much better option on last years models. They actually took options away. While I could deal with a lot of the "anti-consumer" moves that Apple has made late, this is just over the top. The new iMac is nothing more but a bigger Notebook and hence has completely lost it's value as a desktop machine.
Oh and please: How hard is it to manage files? 256 GB is fine for all my files (programs + games). Games I don't play I simply deinstall from Steam. I have a VDSL 50.000 line here, so redownloading them is a no brainer. Same goes for other programs. It must be an American problem with slow inter connections...
Also the way iPhoto handles files is extremely awkward: It actually creates a second copy of the file in another folder. That might me elegant on the surface, but I see absolutely no advantage over simply having a nice hierarchal folder structure. In fact that's what iTunes superbly does. It is a big bag of hurt, that Apple is inconsistent with the way they manage files!