Chosen Solution
Hi guys, I’m going to buy a brand new Mac Mini and I just wanted to ask which is the best solution between buying one with the new Fusion Drive installed or another without it. In the second case, as I told in the title of the question, I’d add another ssd hard drive with the ifixit kit. Now, the question is: in which of these cases I’ll be able to obtain the best performance from my mac? Greetings!
The speed of your fusion drive really depends on the ratio of your SSD to hard drive size and the overall data size on the drives. I have created about 5 fusion drives now all for the purposes of testing and it is not RAID 0 as people assume but Apple’s answer to LVM (if you know Linux) and that being said it blows away the competition in terms of performance. A 128 GB drive with the stock Mini (I assume entry level 500 GB) won’t give you much of a performance boost which is why Apple’s sales point sucks imo because that’s all they are giving you and they are charging a lot. A 240 or 256 GB will give you a substantial performance increase from the 90 MB/s benchmark I got on the 2012 drive alone (far better than 2011 that I just sold) to 250-300 MB/s. If you add 500 GB 840 SSD, now you are talking full SSD speeds as the ratio is 1:1. I tested an install with about 200 GB in data, first on SSD alone and second on fusion and there was no difference. The better thing about fusion besides giving you a 1 TB drive is that all your unused files will automatically be moved to the HDD as your SSD fills up, but until that point everything resides on the SSD. As for compatibility, any SSD works and you will get much better performance if you put in a larger SSD which you can afford if you don’t pay Apple to do it. How to set up a fusion drive Hope that answers the question.
You would get better performance if everything was running of an SSD on your mini, however, with that being said, Apple’s SSDs are extremely fast. On a 2011 MacBook Pro with an SSD installed I get 220 MB/s read and 180 MB/s write, but with and SSD in the 2012 retina macbook pro, the same SSD that comes with the fusion drive, I gat 480 MB/s read and 420 MB/s write. Even though they are both SSDs, the Intel 830 can’t meet Apple’s SSD. There is also the problem of setting it up. If you get a Mac Mini with a Fusion drive, the whole thing will be set up to run together and store files properly. If you choose to install your own SSD, you will still have to configure the fusion drive through the terminal and it still may not be compatible. If it were up to me, I would get it shipped with a fusion drive and avoid the possibility of incompatibilities and other issues you could encounter, but hey, that’s my opinion, you can decide what you would like to do. Hope this Helps
