Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks Go Fusion drive or all SSD?

My understanding, which may be flawed, is that Mavericks RAM compression works by compressing the space being occupied by idle programs.

I often find myself running Photoshop, Parallels, and other apps simultaneously, and they're not idle. (Even if parallels isn't doing anything in Windows, it's still not "idle," as Windows is doing whatever the hell Windows does while it's running.) So, sadly, not likely to benefit me.

Yeah, the idea is that it's faster to uncompress it in memory when activated than to load it off the drive. But I wonder with SSDs and even fusion drives becoming so prevalent, just how accurate this assumption has become?

Ok Tacit, thanks, many just said get an additional 8 on top of the 8 that came with the new 27" but you say max it out? There are two empty slots, so even a non developer user would benefit by having 24 instead of just 16? I could even go 32 but then I'd have to throw away the two 4's they gave me.

Yes, I wish I had just bought the basic model and then gotten 3rd party 1TB and taken it to a store to install. So my imac 27 will always be hard to install? The older ones were easier?

Question: Everything is nice and fast except Adobe Bridge. It still takes one second to generate thumbnail preivews. I cannot believe even after all this Bridge is still slow. I'm on Adobe CC, so maybe it's just a software thing?

Finally: the new 27" is 3 Mhz, yet my 6 year old one was around 3 Mhz. Did the processor get much better in 6 years? Or maybe the processor is overrated? It's the hardrive and Ram that create the speed?

And FinalFinal: I also bought all new USB 3 drives, Hey, I'm not noticing any speed difference between files being on these externals vs the files being on the SSD? Is that odd? It's all about the same in seconds to open.

Final Final Final: the 500 SSD, it said only 350 was available. Meaning 150 was taken from the get go. Hence, the Fusion, which only comes with 128SSD would have been insufficient right? I mean the 128 would not even cover the basics. ANd what is all this 150? My apps are just 30GB which I should try to trim, but the rest? I don't get it.

I have Yosemite and El Capitan installs on SSDs with only OS and apps (including Adobe CS5/MS Office 2011/QuarkXPress). Neither exceeds 60 Gb. You might get a utility like WhatSize to measure your drive to see what's taking up the space?