iMac purchase questions

[fireman0174]

I'm interested in purchasing a new iMac in the near future - holidays maybe? I'm a previous iMac 24" owner, but gave that one last year to my grandchildren, ages 4, 5 and 8.

Since then I've been using my Macbook Pro (early 2015) hooked to an external monitor.

So on the Apple website I'm looking at both the iMac 21.5 inch and the iMac 27 inch and I've got some questions about the hard drive options.

What's the differences between the hard drive, fusion drive and SSD?

For that matter, I don't even know what is a SSD?

This is for a home system, not work related.

Thanks!!

 

[MacInWin]

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.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

A hard drive is the traditional spinning media in either the 5400 or 7200 RPM varieties. A Fusion Drive is Apple's creation whereby they take a spinning HDD and combine it with some amount of SSD (Flash) storage to be used for quick access to data. The OS handles moving data back and forth between the SSD and HDD parts based on your needs.

An SSD (Solid Storage Device) is an all flash media device with no spinning platters. This gets you very good speed, but at a cost. A 1TB HDD and 1TB of SSD will be quite different in price with the SSD being quite a bit higher in comparison.

The SSDs are great when you are using applications that need access to data at a quick clip. If your primary purpose of a computer is leisure browsing and so on, then the HDD will be completely fine (and cheaper). The other advantage is that you can get a lot more for less more than with the SSD.

 

[ferrarr]

Don't forget to look at the Refurbished Apple Store as well, https://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals. But the products there can change in an instant, so be prepared to act, if you see what you consider to be a good deal.

 

[fireman0174]

Much thanks for all the information. Very helpful.

 

[harryb2448]

Go with an SSD. Platter drives are finito, Fusion Drives were a 'make do' when SSDs were outrageously priced and you just will not believe the speed!