On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 10:07 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 07:59:20PM -0600, steve harley wrote: >> on 2013-09-01 17:31 Larry Colen wrote >> >Anybody have any experience, or benchmarks? >> >> i am cautious of Fusion Drive because it means more points of >> failure, and it is an interim solution; but it benchmarks fairly >> well: >> >> <http://www.barefeats.com/hard158.html> >> >> i think it might be hard to retrofit into your iMac; you might have >> to sacrifice the optical drive > > I've been doing some more research on the side, and it looks like > a new mini, with a fusion drive, and a 27" thunderbolt display, and > 16GB of OWC memory, if I get a refurb and a F&F discount, would set > me back about $2,000. Add another $100 for new keyboard and mouse. > > This is probably a better investment than spending $600 or $1,000 on > a six year old iMac, and would probably net me far more than twice > the performance gain.
I agree that $600-$1000 wouldn't be a wise investment. But note that the cost-benefit ratio can be _far_ better than that. I spent a mere $170 on my six year old iMac by installing a 250 GB Samsung SSD (840), replacing the stock 320 GB hard disk. I cleaned off the drive of bulky things so all the fat data is on an external Firewire drive (iTunes db, photographs, video) and there's only 100 GB used on the SSD. The performance boost is remarkable: *everything* sped up noticeably. Yes, heavy computation is still the same speed, but you know what? Besides some complex Photoshop plugins and processing, there's nothing I do that really needs any more CPU at the moment. I agree with those who point out that a six year old iMac is full of bottlenecks like slow buses, but the biggest one of all (after maxing out the RAM) is the hard disk. Fix that and it's like a new computer. Okay, new-er. New-ish. :-) -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
