Amongst the many new products Apple introduced today, they also announced a new storage option called Fusion Drive. Apple's website describes how the drive works:
With Fusion Drive in your iMac, disk-intensive tasks — from booting up to launching apps to importing photos — are faster and more efficient. That’s because frequently used items are kept at the ready on speedy flash storage, while infrequently accessed items go to the hard drive. The file transfers take place in the background, so you won’t even notice.
Some thought the drive might be Apple's implementation of a Hybrid drive which uses SSD as a caching system, but it appears that Apple's system is distinct. The MacObserver digs into some details and clarifies:
To be clear, this is not a caching concept, at least not in the current use of the word. Cache would imply that the data on the SSD is duplicated, and it's not. If you have a 1TB mechanical drive paired with the 128GB SSD, you have a 1.12 TB storage platform. This truly is the fusion of all the space on two separate disks.
In a caching solution, like Intel's, files live on the hard disk drive and are temporarily mirrored to the SSD cache as needed. In an enterprise auto-tiering situation, and with Fusion Drive, the data is actually moved from one tier to another, rather than only being temporarily cached there.
The Mac Observer reports that there are two separate drives that appear as one logical partition. As a result, if your Hard Drive fails, it could be replaced with a 3rd party drive and reconfigured as a Fusion Drive.
Meanwhile, they note that all writes take place on the SSD drive, and are later moved to the mechanical drive if needed, resulting in faster initial writes. The Fusion will be available for the new iMac and new Mac mini models announced today.
Thursday February 5, 2026 12:54 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
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Thursday February 5, 2026 12:22 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
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The report, citing industry sources, is available in English on Macworld.
Apple announced the iPhone 16e on Wednesday, February 19 last year, so the iPhone 17e would be unveiled exactly one year later if this rumor is accurate. It is quite uncommon for Apple to unveil...
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Below, we have recapped known or rumored iOS 26.3 and iOS 26.4 features so far.
iOS 26.3
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The iPhone 18 Pro Max will feature a bigger battery for continued best-in-class battery life, according to a known Weibo leaker.
Citing supply chain information, the Weibo user known as "Digital Chat Station" said that the iPhone 18 Pro Max will have a battery capacity of 5,100 to 5,200 mAh. Combined with the efficiency improvements of the A20 Pro chip, made with TSMC's 2nm process, the...
Personally, an SSD boot drive and separate large HD seems more practical. No need to "fuse" them into one volume. Just seems like asking for trouble.
The fusion drive is just software to automatically handle that. Most consumers probably don't want to have to deal with having a boot drive and a data drive. Some things can be tricky to get onto an external drive, like iTunes and iPhoto libraries.
