Thanks for the tale! This is a pretty low baller move from such a premium company. I bet some apple fanbois won't know why it's slower. It's a wise choice to let 0.1Ghz go for a significant I/O advantage, because often that's the real bottleneck. On Apr 15, 2016 8:32 PM, "Curt Lundgren" <[email protected]> wrote:
> My boss Chris picked up a Retina 27" iMac for my use last year. The 5k > display is awesome, particularly when rendering small size italic text. > Deep color doesn't hurt either, and the best part for me is the ability to > have an xterm open with 120 rows of text that aren't too small to read. > I've had a 27" iMac at home with the 'standard' 2560x1440 display at home, > beautiful display. Yet, look at that small text, looks blocky… > > One of the best features on the work computer is the Fusion drive. It's a > combination of a standard SATA drive and a fast SSD on the PCIe bus. > Apple's CoreStorage presents the pair to the operating system as a single > volume. It automagically migrates the most often used files to the faster > storage. Bootup is fast, application loading is fast, and so on. I use > Microsoft Word for Mac as an example of bloatware - it loads and is ready > for use in under a second. > > Well, who wouldn't want such a machine? It runs Unix, is very > Linux-friendly - and every once in a while it's fun to watch a 4K YouTube > video just to enjoy the display. I spend hours mangling Perl code at the > computer and generally approve of its features. Save your pennies, get the > computer. I ordered a 3.2 GHz Core i5 unit with the same 1 TB Fusion > drive. It arrives, I set it up, looks fantastic; I bring it home. Lucky > thing I looked at System Information. After the initial shock, some > research. It seems that around August Apple chose to reduce the size of > the SSD from 120 GB to 23-1/2 GB. Without telling anyone, let's cut the > capacity by more than a factor of five. Something stinks here, and the > smell is coming from Cupertino. > > After a few discussion with Apple I picked up the 3.3 GHz model with the 2 > TB Fusion drive - this one actually has the 120 GB SSD. Meanwhile, some > performance metrics… > > I thought there would be no observable difference between a 3.2 GHz > computer and a 3.3 GHz computer. Indeed there are. Since I'd invested a > full day in setting things up on the 3.2 GHz unit, I used Super Duper to > copy an image of the OS onto a 2 TB drive, using USB 3.0. Very impressive > performance - 105 MB/sec sustained performance. > > The 3.3 GHz unit comes home, now the imaging is set up in the other > direction. Wow, it sustains 150 MB/sec transfer speed going onto the > system disk. I am impressed! I had been doing SCP file transfers from the > older 2.7 GHz iMac. With the 3.2 GHz iMac the speed was about 90 MB/sec - > and that's doing encryption/decryption on the files of course. I did the > same transfers with the 3.3 GHz unit, seeing some sustained 103 MB/sec > transfers. I've never seen SCP run this fast. > > The swap of the 3.2 GHz unit for the faster one with the 'real' Fusion > drive coat $175, more or less - well worth it. But if you like Macs and > think the 1 TB Fusion drive is a good idea, you may wish to reconsider. > > Curt > > -- > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en > > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
