HDD, SSD, and Fusion Drive Options Benchmarked for Apple's Recent 27-inch iMac

[Akshay Masand]

When purchasing a new 27-inch iMac through Apple, one of the many things people get confused about is which storage option to go with. The folks at Bare Feats have put together a look at the performance of four of the five storage options available wen custom-ordered a 27-inch iMac. The report includes a look at the 1 TB and 3 TB hard disks (which is a 7,200 RPM Seagate Barracuda drive), the 768 solid state drive (SSD) and a 1 TB Fusion Drive.



In their testing the SSD option was found to perform the best, offering a throughput of 440 MB/s when writing large files and 477 MB/s when reading large files. Small random transfers hit 208 MB/s when writing and 140 MB/s when reading. The Fusion Drive didn’t manage to quite keep up and even had a noteworthy caveat as it hit 325 MB/s when writing large files and 482 MB/s when reading them. When it came to smaller files, the Fusion Drive had 127 MB/s writing and 129 MB/s reading. The caveat was that the Fusion Drive saw a nearly 50% decrease in transfer speed when attempting to move files large than the free space on the drive’s “fused” SSD portion.



When it came to the traditional hard disk options, they performed consistently as everyone would expect them to. For those of you who are interested, hit the source link below to check out the full benchmarks on Bare Feats’ site. We highly recommend doing so if you are thinking of getting a built-to-order 27 iMac.

Source: Bare Feats via TUAW

[Colin9001]

27 inch monitor wut

[thixtythix]

I have the top rated 27inch without customising anything so its got the 1tb hdd been waiting for 3 weeks and its currently in Almaty, Kazakhstan and has been scanned out so i dont know what the next country its going to on the way to the UK lol