At their recent event in October, Apple unveiled a new drive technology called "Fusion Drive", combining the speed of a SSD with the capacity of a traditional HDD. Some people said that this is nothing new since Intel and others offer Hybrid Drive solutions, but that is not entirely true. In typical hybrid drives, the SSD is only used as a caching solution. Which provides faster read and write acces, but especially the read access doesnt come close to that of a SSD. With Apples Fusion Drive you get 128 GB of real SSD storage and 1TB or 3TB of HDD storage. What happens then is that as much as possible is put onto the SSD leaving only 4 to 10 GB of free space. As soon as the HDD is almost at full capacity, data is written to the HDD. Furthermore the OS handles your data so that data that you use often will be transferred to the SSD and data that you dont access that much is transferred to the HDD. That means that the OS, probably most of your applications and the most used files will be stored on the SSD part of your drive, resulting in an all-SSD feeling in your everyday usage. Boot times are basically that of an SSD and your day to day applications also launch with SSD-speed. Writing data will work at a very high speed as well, as long as you transfer less than 4 GB at a time. Thats the minimum of free space the SSD will always have in order to provide faster writing speed. Apple offers Fusion Drives in their new Mac minis and iMacs. The 3TB Fusion Drive will only be available with the 27" iMac.
