Apple Adopts SSD + HDD Integration

Apple was a pioneer in incorporating SSD into notebooks and eliminating HDDs on several configurations and it seems that the company was progressively being a small customer for HDD manufacturers.

But the company just changes its mind, understanding that users want the speed of SSD but also the benefit of the higher capacity of HDDs for a reasonable price.

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display features from 128GB to 768GB of flash storage only, but at high price, $1,699 with 258GB on SSD.

But the most recent Fusion Drive is different. It combines SSD and HDD. It’s not what we generally call "hybrid drive", a rotating drive with an integrated flash memory as a cache at no more than 8GB to 32GB depending on the manufacturers (Seagate, Toshiba and WD). It’s more a hybrid solution with dual storage (often used for RAIDs), combining here a pure 128GB MLC SSD also used as a cache and a Seagate 1TB or 3TB 3.5-inch HDD. The new solution, needing more space into the computer, works on the same manner: the OS and most frequently used data and applications are loaded in the SSD, but much more efficient with 128GB. For the user, the two drives are seen as the same volume. Apple claims the new platform provides a 3.5x performance boost versus HDD only.

Fusion Drive is probably the result of the technology from Anobit Technologies Ltd. (acquired by Apple for $390 million last January), an Israeli start-up in controller chips for SSDs already incorporated into iPad, iPhone 4S and Mac BookAir.

Apple is not the only one to embrace this king a hybrid solution. Other ones include Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo.

Hybrid drives or hybrid solutions? We personally think that hybrid drives is an interim technology, as the size of the flash cache capacity will progressively increase – because the price per gigabyte of flash chip is going down faster for flash chip than HDD -, to finally eliminate the rotating device. Hybrid solutions will remain there for a long time when there is a need of mass storage capacity. At the end, HDDs will be only used to backup SSDs and archiving, no more for primary storage.

Note also that Apple is progressively eliminating optical disc drive for all its configurations.