Hard Drive VS Fusion Drive : Comparison and Differences
So you are buying a new Apple Mac! However, let me tell you, just before purchasing, have a look at its storage types! You must be thinking what I am saying and referring to. In very simple words, every Apple Mac comes with different storage options, i.e. Fusion Drive, Flash Drive (SDD) and Hard Drive. Now, what are these? And in what way we can compare Hard Drive VS Fusion Drive? These are the answerable questions about which this article is.
In This Article
Hard Drive VS Fusion Drive
What is Hard Drive? :
It is quite understood that if you have a hard drive, you have the storage capacity. It comes to the market with either 500GB or 1TB storage space. It is considered a traditional and standard storage option even in today’s PCs. It basically consists of data platters where the data is stored.
Platters:
These platters are like small CDs. A little arm moves back and forth and reads the information stored on the platters. To meet the requirements of a working hard drive, this small arm will move back and forth millions of times.
- Pros:
- It is a huge platform to store all your data onto it.
- It is least expensive.
- Cons:
- One of the downsides of these traditional Drives is that they tend to not be as reliable as SSDs because of these spinning platters, their moving part.
- Your computer’s overall speed tends to reduce or even become unresponsive if your Hard Drive gets full because these platters would take a while to read the information.
What is Flash Drive? :
On second comes a Flash Drive. It is simply another option for storage with even larger storage capacity. It is also termed as Solid State Flash Memory Drive (SSD). The quality it has is that it omits mechanical spinning platters hard drive for more mass data storage.
- Pros:
- There is a variety of the storage sizes of Flash Drives such as 256 GBs, 512 GBs, 1 and 2 TBs.
- Everything gets stored very fast and quick onto SSD.
- Cons:
- It is expensive.
- It also has some very real unknowns like in how much time will the data stay recorded on the Flash Memory and remain intact.
What is Fusion Drive? :
Presenting you a Fusion drive!
As its name indicates it is a “fusion” of SSD having smaller storage capacity with Hard Drive consisting of spinning platters.
It uses a larger capacity hard drive to store more bulk data and SSD of this drive is used to install the OS, applications and has a small extra room for data storage on this portion of the fusion drive.
- Pros:
- It is cheaper.
- The start-up of OS and launching of an application is quite speedy with Fusion Drive.
- Fusion drive’s storage technology is more reliable and predictable.
- Cons:
- Once the SSD drive gets full depending on the size of SSD portion, the rest of your data will be stored on the mechanical Hard Drive portion of Fusion Drive which is slower which means that the reading and/or writing processes of data proceeds at a speed much slower than that of SSD portion.
Comparison of Fusion Drive VS Hard Drive & Fusion Drive VS Flash Drive:
Let’s correlate the Fusion Drive with Hard Drive and Flash Drive. This way you will be able to select one for you that just go smoothly with your requirements regarding the storage capacity of Apple devices.
Coming to the comparison of Fusion Drive with both mechanical Hard Drive and Flash Drive:
Hard Drive VS Fusion Drive:
Does it worth paying extra money to have it? :
Assuming that the Hard Drive would cost even less than the Fusion Drive, you might be thinking to purchase a standard mechanical Hard Drive for you. However, this is should not be the case because if your Mac is not providing you one as a standard, you really don’t pay a great deal to upgrade to a Fusion Drive.
In order to update your very new entry-level Mac from a 1TB, Hard Drive to a 1TB Fusion Drive would cost you few bucks. Seriously, it would not make a big difference to your pocket.
Your Apple Device would start up in seconds rather than minutes, once you upgrade to a Fusion Drive.
Consequently, you should expect files to open much faster and your apps to launch even quicker.
The Fusion Drive offers you a substantial speed boost in comparison to a Hard Drive. Recently tested 2.3GHz iMac with standard hard drive and the 3.4GHz iMac with Fusion Drive showed huge differences in timings of file copying. Same was the case with start-up timings; they were a world apart.
In addition to this Fusion Drive is comparatively much reliable than Hard Drive because a typical Hard Drive uses spinning little arms called platters which are not trustworthy.
SSD VS Fusion Drive:
One of the biggest, worth mentioning the difference between a Fusion Drive and SSD is ‘the price.’ Though it is clear that SSD is much, much faster in terms of speed than the other two options like Hard Drive and Fusion Drive but Fusion Drive would not cut your bank either.
Final Verdict:
If all you want is to have a Drive with enough capacity to store your data and yeah the extra bulk of your data and in addition to this you also do not want to spend much on your Drive, then you have the best solution for this ‘A Hybrid, The Fusion Drive’, a combo of spinning platters Hard Drive and Solid State Flash Memory Drive (SSD).
In this article, we have looked at what is High-Density Disk Hard Drive, Flash Drive, and Fusion Drive, what are they capable of and vice versa and their comparison with one another. Hopefully, this guide is enough to provide you relevant information regarding storage options for Apple Devices. In case of any query, comment below! It would be appreciated on our part!