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The problem with Aperture in this context is that it mainly involves file importing.

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On Apple's Web site, it points to its Aperture photo management software in particular.

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I was told that as long as the vendors don't code in any aggressive data management techniques of their own, you should see a benefit. I asked Apple if any software vendors had committed to optimizing their data handling for Fusion storage. 3D game performance depends largely on CPU and graphics horsepower, but I didn't anticipate that even loading levels and initial game menus would be so entirely CPU-bound. I tried a few things here - timing how long it took to get to the main menu, timing a saved game load - but the times never changed, even after four or five tries (15 seconds to the main menu, 27 seconds to load a 'Huge' saved game, every time). I found a different issue with Civilization V.

We concluded (and Apple did not disagree) that Photoshop has too much of its own file and memory management activity going on in the background, effectively superseding Fusion. This seemed promising at first, since the initial load into Photoshop took about 30 seconds, but subsequent loads were all over the place timewise, going as high as 49 seconds, and then back down to the low 30s. With the help of Lori Grunin, our digital imaging editor, I then tried timing how long it took Photoshop to load a multilayered 1.8GB PSD file built from 16-bit raw images from the Nikon D800. The problem is that it launched almost instantly on the first attempt, making it pointless to keep launching it in order to find a speed boost. My first idea was to launch a demanding application like Photoshop. I tried a few strategies, but was never able to find a definitive speed improvement. The idea here was to see how much faster a file loads after it's been moved over to the solid-state drive. Tracking down Fusion's effect on file reads was harder. If you have a large write incoming and you already have 300GB of data on the Mac Mini, short of moving a large amount of data from the system entirely, there's nothing you can do to preemptively clear out room for the large write on the SSD. The downside is that Apple gives you no ability to manually manage file locations. Go beyond that, and your larger writes slow down. The conclusion is that while fast, the 3.54GB file write landed on SSD's 4GB write space reserve, and the larger folder write spanned across both the fast SSD and the comparably slower mechanical hard drive.ДЄll of this is to say that once the solid-state drive is full, your file writes should be superfast as long as you stay within that 4GB limit. Instead, the larger write started out very fast for the first 4GB according to the progress bar, but for the rest of the transfer it slowed down considerably, ultimately taking more than 3.5 times as long to write as the smaller file.

If the larger file write had occurred at the same transfer speed as the smaller file, you would expect that it would take exactly twice as long. It's only when you want to write more than 4GB at a time that you'll notice a slowdown. That means your day-to-day write activities, like saving different versions of files and moving folders around, will usually end up on the SSD even if you already have a lot of data on the Mac Mini. The reason is that even after you've loaded more than 128GB to the Mac Mini, Fusion keeps a permanent 4GB chunk of space available on the SSD for writes. One thing Fusion does exceptionally well is accelerate data writing. Once you surpass that 128GB, the benefits of Fusion vary depending on what you're doing. Until you overwhelm the SSD, everything feels fast.

#3.2ghz core i7 mac mini review install#

Remember, until you write more than 128GB of data to the Mac Mini, everything you install or write to the disk goes straight to the SSD. The extent to which you notice the benefits of Fusion depends on how much data you have on the Mac Mini, as well as the application you're using. From that point on, accessing that particular block of data should be faster. After that second ping, as long as you're within the same user session and you've allowed the system to idle for 20 seconds or so, Apple's Fusion software will automatically move the data over to the solid-state drive, replacing a less active block. It makes that call after you've accessed a data block twice. Once the mechanical drive does start receiving data, Apple's Fusion software kicks in to determine which blocks you might be accessing more often (efficiently, Fusion can move individual blocks of data, as opposed to entire files).