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<blockquote data-quote="MacInWin" data-source="post: 1803298" data-attributes="member: 396914"><p>A hard drive is a spinning platter on which your data is stored. It's a technology that has been around for decades and the prices are really low right now. The downside is that because it's a mechanical device, the speed of access of data is relatively low.</p><p></p><p>An SSD is a Solid State Drive, basically large memory chips that look to the operating system like a hard drive, but because they operate a memory speeds and have no mechanical parts, are very, very fast. They are also relatively expensive, which is the downside, and the current upper limit on size means they tend to be slightly smaller than HDs.</p><p></p><p>A fusion drive is a blend of the two. The spinning drive is melded with some memory chips and the two look like one drive to the operating system. The fusion is an attempt to have the speed of the SSD with the cost of the HD. It is faster than an HD as the reads and writes are mostly from the memory chips, with the data being moved to the HD in the background when not otherwise busy. It is larger than the typical SSD as the HD can be quite large. The downside is that if either of the two fail, you lose everything on both. Of course, you lose everything if either an HD or SSD fails, but the added complexity of the fusion drive does present a slightly higher probability of that failure. </p><p></p><p>So, HDs are large, cheap and slow; SSDs are small, expensive but very, very fast; Fusion drives are in the middle, but add significant complexity.</p><p></p><p>Hope that helps.</p><p></p><p>My personal recommendation is to go for the SSD and get the largest you can afford. Speed is always good.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="MacInWin, post: 1803298, member: 396914"] A hard drive is a spinning platter on which your data is stored. It's a technology that has been around for decades and the prices are really low right now. The downside is that because it's a mechanical device, the speed of access of data is relatively low. An SSD is a Solid State Drive, basically large memory chips that look to the operating system like a hard drive, but because they operate a memory speeds and have no mechanical parts, are very, very fast. They are also relatively expensive, which is the downside, and the current upper limit on size means they tend to be slightly smaller than HDs. A fusion drive is a blend of the two. The spinning drive is melded with some memory chips and the two look like one drive to the operating system. The fusion is an attempt to have the speed of the SSD with the cost of the HD. It is faster than an HD as the reads and writes are mostly from the memory chips, with the data being moved to the HD in the background when not otherwise busy. It is larger than the typical SSD as the HD can be quite large. The downside is that if either of the two fail, you lose everything on both. Of course, you lose everything if either an HD or SSD fails, but the added complexity of the fusion drive does present a slightly higher probability of that failure. So, HDs are large, cheap and slow; SSDs are small, expensive but very, very fast; Fusion drives are in the middle, but add significant complexity. Hope that helps. My personal recommendation is to go for the SSD and get the largest you can afford. Speed is always good. [/QUOTE]
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