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Apple’s Fusion Drive very much appears to be auto tiering for the mass market, (You’ll remember auto tiering from 2010 when NetApp said it was dead) but what worries me is a lack of RAID protection and the unknown right now around what happens if the Flash Drive physical component or the Hard Drive physical component of a logical Fusion Drive, fails? We can’t say you lose everything as this could be more a file system namespace where each storage component is accessible independent of the other (Like individual storage containers in DDOS using Extended Retention) and less a concatenated disk set. Those details will out very quickly. As you might know when Flash Drives fail they tend to just blink out like a blown light bulb, assuming Apple are using the endurance technology acquired from their Anobit acquisition they’ll certainly claim the other parts of the system could go before their Flash drive does. But again, like a light bulb. It’s not like hard drives where funny noises and other failing electro-mechanical randomness can give you a heads up that service is about to be withdrawn any day now. In general if you’ve thrown all your data into a single SSD bucket you need to be on top of backups. Bad things happen to good people for no other reason than that they can, but as we come out of the early adopter phase on the consumer side of things we’re going to be shaking out the quality from the crap real soon now as the technology in use ages and gets some miles under it’s tires. Take those backups of your personal data to a hard drive, optical disc, punch card, tape, the cloud, whatever you have to hand and works for you so you can make sure it matters not who your device manufacturer placed their bet with early on. Quick side note, in this case keeping HFS+ kicking around actually allows Apple to get out in front. Microsoft’s NTFS replacement ReFS and the underlying Windows Storage Spaces with it’s Slab extents is an attempt to do a storage controller for the DAS Microsoft want you to run Exchange & SQL Server on. As such auto tiering on Windows with ReFS and Storage Spaces could take a while longer as the concept is more ambitious and also aimed at the Enterprise, not the desktop. But it will happen. |
