Apple Fusion Drive

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Rook
Posts: 152
Joined: 16 Jan 2015

18 Jan 2016

I'm planning on getting a new iMac soon (my first Mac). Anyone have any experience with the fusion drives? Curious how well it would work for a DAW, Reason more specifically.

I think I might end up getting the flash storage option instead and just use an external USB 3 drive for samples and audio recording, but figured I'd ask.

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tronam
Posts: 486
Joined: 04 Mar 2015

18 Jan 2016

Rook wrote:I'm planning on getting a new iMac soon (my first Mac). Anyone have any experience with the fusion drives? Curious how well it would work for a DAW, Reason more specifically.

I think I might end up getting the flash storage option instead and just use an external USB 3 drive for samples and audio recording, but figured I'd ask.

Sent from my D6616 using Tapatalk
If there's the budget for it, go full flash. That's the route I just went (27" skylake i7 4GHz with SSD) and don't regret it for a second. Apple's SSD drives/controllers are impressively fast with read/write speeds exceeding 2 gigabytes/sec and my iMac boots up in less than 10 seconds. That being said, Reason is not really the type of application that would stress an SSD very hard though, so the primary motivations should be for overall system responsiveness and lack of drive noise. Most modern spindle drives can handle Reason just fine, so if going fusion, make sure it's at least the 2TB option which has the 128GB SSD. The 1TB fusion drive has a smaller SSD at only 24GB. That way you'll still get the benefits of faster boot times and application launching.
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

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Rook
Posts: 152
Joined: 16 Jan 2015

18 Jan 2016

tronam wrote: If there's the budget for it, go full flash. That's the route I just went (27" skylake i7 4GHz with SSD) and don't regret it for a second. Apple's SSD drives/controllers are impressively fast with read/write speeds exceeding 2 gigabytes/sec and my iMac boots up in less than 10 seconds. That being said, Reason is not really the type of application that would stress an SSD very hard though, so the primary motivations should be for overall system responsiveness and lack of drive noise. Most modern spindle drives can handle Reason just fine, so if going fusion, make sure it's at least the 2TB option which has the 128GB SSD. The 1TB fusion drive has a smaller SSD at only 24GB. That way you'll still get the benefits of faster boot times and application launching.
Cool! Thanks for the response. That's exactly the machine I'm looking at too. I might as well go with the 256gb flash.

How's that i7 with Reason? I figure it's probably way overkill for me. The i5 would probably do just fine and would still be way beyond my current setup (I've been using an old i3 for the past 5 years). But I've never had a really 'nice' computer, so I want to go all out this time :D

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tronam
Posts: 486
Joined: 04 Mar 2015

19 Jan 2016

Rook wrote:How's that i7 with Reason? I figure it's probably way overkill for me. The i5 would probably do just fine and would still be way beyond my current setup (I've been using an old i3 for the past 5 years). But I've never had a really 'nice' computer, so I want to go all out this time :D
It runs very well; orders of magnitude faster than my 2009 Core2Duo system. Don't skimp on the processor if the plan is to have the system for a while. Spending a little more now pays off in the long run. Also avoid extra RAM from Apple as it's extremely overpriced. Go for the base level 8GB and get more directly from the source like crucial.com which tests and lifetime guarantees their memory at 1/3 the cost.

One thing to note about high-DPI screens like the 5K 27" "retina" iMac or other 4k/5k high resolution monitors for Windows is that Reason isn't optimized for those types of displays yet. The text fields are though, so at least they benefit from the razor sharp clarity, but the graphics elements themselves have to be scaled up. It's a shame this transition hasn't happened yet because it's truly a sight to behold when the programs are properly optimized for it. Surely it has to be on the horizon considering how common it is now and theoretically the Props could just batch re-render all of the RE assets at higher resolution.
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

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selig
RE Developer
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Joined: 15 Jan 2015
Location: The NorthWoods, CT, USA

19 Jan 2016

I have two iMacs with fusion drives that work quite well. Having said that, I am currently moving back and forth between two setups and am 100% running from an external USB drive. To be totally honest, I can't see ANY difference between the two, except maybe the fusion drive boots faster - but I don't often shut down so I don't experience a re-boot all that often!
Selig Audio, LLC

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adfielding
Posts: 959
Joined: 19 May 2015
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19 Jan 2016

I picked up a fusion drive with my iMac last summer, and I think it's great. I'd rather have had the option to have an SSD for the OS and applications, and a HDD for documents and other stuff (as was the case in my old PC), but for a single drive solution this strikes a nice balance between price and performance I think.

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