You’ll want to select “Apple SSD SM0256G Media” by clicking on it. On many Macs, the name of the disk might be something like “Apple SSD SM0256G Media” while the partition name is “Macintosh HD”. It’s important that you select the disk, not a partition. My personal favorite way of launching Disk Utility is to click on the Siri button in the Dock or menu bar, then say “Launch Disk Utility”.Ģ) Select the disk from the list in the left sidebar of Disk Utility (see screenshot below). From the Finder, it’s easy to go directly to Utilities by selecting Go > Utilities from the menu bar, or just use the Shift-Command-U keyboard shortcut. In addition, external and USB drives are usually not SMART-enabled.ġ) Launch Disk Utility, which is found in the Utilities folder inside of the Applications folder. For those drives, it’s doubly important to make sure that you have recent complete backups of your data. One word of warning before we get started: older Macs and drives may not have SMART-enabled drives.
#WHAT IS MAC FUSION DRIVE HOW TO#
In today’s Tech Tip, I’ll show you how to check the SMART status of your internal disk storage.
#WHAT IS MAC FUSION DRIVE MAC#
SMART status reports if a drive is failing and can tell you when there’s a severe problem with the disk hardware, so the Mac owner can back up important data and replace the ailing drive. Hard drive performance just isn’t good enough.Are you SMART about the health of the drives in your Mac? SMART stands for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, and it’s a way for a drive to report its health or problems to macOS. Honestly, we can’t currently recommend a hard disk drive as the primary storage for a Mac unless low cost is paramount. Barring that, a Fusion Drive-particularly one with 128 GB of flash storage-remains a good compromise. If you need more space than an SSD can provide, consider using the SSD internally and adding an external hard drive connected via USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3. We anticipate that will change at some point in the next year, and APFS might make Fusion Drives even a bit faster.Īll that said, if you want the best performance and can afford the cost, get an SSD. As of this writing, macOS 10.13 High Sierra will not convert a Fusion Drive to Apple’s new APFS file system. The company subsequently increased it to 32 GB, but if you’re buying a new iMac and want better performance from a Fusion Drive, go for either 2 TB or 3 TB, both of which have 128 GB of flash storage. Originally, all Fusion Drives had 128 GB of speedy flash storage alongside the hard drive, but in 2015, Apple reduced the amount of flash storage in the iMac’s 1 TB Fusion Drive to a paltry 24 GB (the Mac mini’s 1 TB Fusion Drive still has 128 GB). They come in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB sizes, although not all iMac and Mac mini models can accept the larger Fusion Drives.\ But not all Fusion Drives are created equal. Try editing some photos from last year in Photos and you’ll likely be working entirely on the slow hard drive.Īlso, Apple provides the Fusion Drive as an option only for the iMac and Mac mini there’s no room it in a modern MacBook. Good as a Fusion Drive is, it will never be as fast as a pure SSD, and you’ll probably notice that most when working with older files. In essence, the Fusion Drive provides much of the speed of an SSD along with the capacity of a hard drive.
![what is mac fusion drive what is mac fusion drive](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EawUqH1cgO0/maxresdefault.jpg)
The user sees just a single volume, but behind the scenes, macOS automatically and dynamically moves frequently used files-notably those used by the operating system-to the flash storage portion of the Fusion Drive for faster access while keeping infrequently used files on the hard drive. As its name suggests, a Fusion Drive melds a hard disk drive with flash storage to provide the best of both worlds. In 2012, Apple came up with a compromise: the Fusion Drive. But chips are more expensive than hard disk platters and read/write heads, so the $250–$300 that will get you an 8 TB hard drive is enough for only a 1 TB SSD. Because SSDs rely on flash storage, a type of non-volatile memory whose chips retain data without power, they’re lightning fast.
![what is mac fusion drive what is mac fusion drive](https://storage.googleapis.com/hardwrk-com-target/4e05b215c5e19e165b7cb9fe726d1bdde61f89af/FusionDrive-800x500.png)
However, they’re relatively slow.įor speed, you want a solid-state drive, also known as an SSD. For the lowest cost per gigabyte, you can’t go wrong with a hard drive, and they come in truly massive sizes-up to a whopping 8 terabytes. There are two basic types of storage devices available today: hard disk drives and solid-state drives.