Well, my mid-2011 27” iMac is starting to slow down. It still does the job but I can tell the end is getting near. I could likely milk another year out of it but I just think it’s time for a new machine. The one I have has been used heavily, daily, for almost 9 years and has served me well.

While shopping 2019 iMacs, I’m torn on if I should go with the 2TB fusion drive or opt for the 512GB SSD or (more likely) the 1TB SSD.

I’ve read mixed reviews on the Fusion Drives.

Does anyone have any insight here?

It seems a lot of people go with an SSD and then tack on external storage.

I have a 1TB old school spinner drive in my iMac today and have 200GB free. So if I went with the 1TB SSD in my new machine I should be just fine.

It’s a pricy upgrade for SSD but I think it might be worth it. Can anyone talk me out of it?

I personally own a 2015 iMac (with a spindle hard drive).
About 2 years ago I was unhappy with the response time of it - so I forked over the cash to get an SSD installed.

It's a HUGE difference.
I'll never go back to spindles again.

Just get the 1TB SSD.

Recently installed an external SSD boot drive with Thunderbolt in my older iMac and even that improves the performance noticibly.

When I upgrade to a new iMac it will definitely be SSD.

I have the 2 TB Fusion drive in my late 2015 iMac and am pleased with its' performance so far. Quick boot up and lots of storage for my photos. When I purchased mine, either the larger SSD's were not yet available or cost prohibitive.

quote:

Originally posted by creslin: It's a HUGE difference.
I'll never go back to spindles again.

Same results and future plans here. Boot up is very quick with no moving parts to fail. 1TB is plenty of storage for now, and if needed external storage solutions are cheap.

I went with the SSD and its great...

Whenever I upgrade , I get as much as I can possibly afford to make sure it lasts a while.

What seems like overkill now will be outdated and tired in a very short time...

I'm all about SSDs if you have the resources (funds) but the Fusion drives are a good alternative.

But first, have you considered a nuke and pave? Or maybe memory, or a SSD external or internal boot drive?

I was having quite a few issues with slowness and lock-ups even with the upgrades I made (SSD and memory). I purchased a 1TB Samsung External SSD drive and connected it via USB. Put all of my files - other than Apps and such - on that SSD and basically started fresh. Put all the PDF, DOC, XLS, Photos, Quicken backups... on that drive, and started fresh with everything.

This took some time, but it has been running a lot better for the last year. I prepared for this by thinking about it and making notes for almost two weeks on-and-off before I started the process. (Did not want to loose anything.)

I ran into some complexities since I'm running VMWare Fusion to run Windows 10 for one program I need. I had a MacBook Pro to use to download files as needed during the process.

My specs are below, but my machine is running fine. The only thing pushing me to think about an upgrade is editing and processing 2.7k and 4k video with Premiere Pro. It's choking bad on that stuff. My machine can not handle it. It's also pretty slow when I'm doing high-res, 300 dpi brochures with a lot of layers in Photoshop.

I have a Mid-2011 iMac with a 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with 24GB of RAM memory and a AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 512 MB on board. I had installed a 500 GB SSD drive inside the machine and had it replace the original 1TB drive that remains in place and is available to use.

The SSD is running out of space now, but I have two 2TB Trancend HD external, one for photos/video and the other for Time Machine. Then the 1 TB Samsung SSD plugged in for moving files and such.

On Macs without user-replaceable drives, Fusion drives are just fine. If you have the option of replacing the drive yourself, I would stay away from Fusion because Apple doesn't provide the tools to build a new one should one of the partners fail. For those that don't know, a Fusion drive is a regular hard drive married to a small SSD used for caching. It gives you (mostly) the speed of an SSD, and the capacity and lower cost per MB of a hard drive.

Get the SSD. It’s worth it for so many reasons.

That said, I would never have 800GB of data on my machines hard drive. Keep the files that you access regularly., and move all the archive files to an external SSD. This will help with keeping the new system fast.

Having 2018 iMac w/o SSD for work and my personal 2014 MBP with 500GB SSD, there is NO QUESTION.

GET THE SSD.

You don't think a regular drive is slow, but compared to an SSD machine, it's night and day.

To the point I haven't used my work iMac in months, if not a year. It just sits there.

 
I agree with the SSD crowd. Since the advent of SSDs, I have replaced platter drives with SSDs where I could (2011 Mini, for example), and ordered them after they became a widely available option. I would not have a platter drive of any kind as a boot disk any more.
 
Apple's newer SSD's are very fast, because they are connected directly to the motherboard's PCI bus. No more SATA interface to slow them down.
 
Also, fusion drives can be a bear to recreate, if you fool around at all with formatting your drive. I see fusion drives as an obsolete method of transitioning from platter to all SSD. I suppose it does offer a cheaper option to SSDs without having to have a plain old platter drive, but the SSD beats the snot out of it. Plus you don't have to worry about a mechanical drive failure down the road.

SSDs do like to have a bit of free space. I work around that by keeping my data on external (SATA) SSDs, and keep my boot drive lean. 256GB would be plenty for me, but I've always bought the 512GB model to "future-proof", at not a whole lot more money. On my current desktop, with all the data offloaded, my boot drive is using about 45GB of the 512GB available.
 
I use this Oyen Digital 2 bay external SSD enclosure for my offloaded data. I holds 2 SATA SSDs. I just use the 2 SATA SSDs as separate drives, no RAID. It connects via USB-C 3.1 Gen2 (10Gbs), so the SSDs provide the full performance they are capable of.

I am 3 months into an upgrade from a 2011 MacBook Pro to a 2019 MacBook Pro, so I went through the same thoughts on hard drives recently.
Ultmately, I looked at prices of both conventional HDs (spinners) and SSDs, and realized that external storage is getting less expensive by the day.
I do commercial video, and it takes up a lot of space.
So, I went with a 512GB SSD on the MacBook Pro, and have a 4TB external HD to store raw video files. With external SSD prices falling...I'll start adding 1TB and higher externals over the next year.
Get the SSD for the internal drive, with as much space as you need to operate day-to-day. Then, get external drives for storage.

Great insight here, thanks guys. I’m definitely going to go the SSD route — just a matter now of 512 or 1GB.

quote:

1GB

You might need more than that.

One thing that kept me from taking the same route you are considering is the newer iMac didn't have an internal optical disc drive.

That and my AT&T internet really sucks so a new computer wouldn't be any faster.

quote:

Originally posted by .38supersig:
One thing that kept me from taking the same route you are considering is the newer iMac didn't have an internal optical disc drive.

The last mac with an internal optical drive was a 2012 model MBP (non-retina). Any external DVD drive/burner will work just fine. I think I dig mine out about once a year.

quote:

Originally posted by henryaz:

quote:

Originally posted by .38supersig:
One thing that kept me from taking the same route you are considering is the newer iMac didn't have an internal optical disc drive.

The last mac with an internal optical drive was a 2012 model MBP (non-retina). Any external DVD drive/burner will work just fine. I think I dig mine out about once a year.

Yeah, I have an external DVD/CD drive that I bought myself and the company bought me one when I got the new iMac.

Tested them out once or twice, otherwise they just collect dust and it would take me 5-10 min to actually find them.

In my instance, I have about 75 shop manuals on DVD from various manufacturers of automobiles, excavators, and heavy trucks.

Having an external drive cable and cables for everything else plugged into the back just wouldn't work in my environment.

I have one of these also. After a lot of pondering I instead went with a 5TB high RPM HD about a year ago. The SSD/speed increase vs. 5x working scratch storage was a tough decision. The speed increase cost vs. storage just didn't meet my needs.

(I changed the drives out and it's ain't for the faint of heart as you have to remove the display). There is actually another SSD capable port on the back of the motherboard but I hadn't had enough to drink to go for that one. You can also use the DVD drive port as well. Lots of options, but somewhat challenging to implement.

We use this one for a lot of video editing/greenscreening and photoshop work.
Using external drives during a large project is a pain I try to avoid as we have multiple folks working on things.



I maxed out the ram and went with the storage capability, it does just fine.

These are tough and useful older machines, particularly when you consider some people regard a 2018 computer as "old"...