Mac mini with Fusion Drive

The other day I had the opportunity to install a new Mac mini with 16Gb RAM, a 1Tb Fusion drive, and a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display. If you haven't heard of a Fusion Drive, it is a hybrid between a Solid State Drive (SSD) and a traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). SSDs are much like RAM in that they are very, very, fast; and very, very, expensive. HDDs are inexpensive, can store massive amounts of data, but are very slow by comparison. The main bottleneck in most computers now-a-days is the HDD. With the Fusion Drive Apple has done a clever bit of software magic behind the scenes — the drive dynamically keeps often-used data on the SSD, while permanently storing everything on the HDD. The result is the best of both worlds: the speed of SSD and the price of HDD.

Before I had a chance to form a first impression, I ran into trouble. However, the end result was a killer-fast new desktop computer with loads of RAM and storage, and a beautiful 27" display — a sight to behold.

The trouble started when I tried to migrate the user data. There was about 200Gb of data. As the process got started the Migration Utility reported that there was not enough space on the 1Tb Fusion Drive for the data. Whoa — shot-blocked before I got started. I poked around as best I could in the Migration Utility, but nothing I did would persuade it to take the data.

My first line of attack was to create a new user and explore the Mac mini. When I arrived at the Desktop, and checked the drive info, sure enough it reported 34Gb of total space with 14Gb available. However, Disk Utility reported the drive as a 1Tb drive. Huh… I called Apple.

The Apple rep had nothing in her notes that equipped her for this. She immediately started to talk to second tier support. While on hold I decided to boot in recovery mode (hold down command-r while rebooting) — which I should have done before calling. I ran Disk Utility from there and did a disk repair — it found stuff and repaired it. As I said, I should have done this first. After I got off hold, I sheepishly told the Apple rep what I did and that her services were no longer needed. After rebooting everything was fine. Except I didn't trust it.

Not trusting the data on the drive, I decided to boot back into recovery mode and do a complete reinstall. After starting this process I realized that the mini had come with pre-installed Apps. Ooops.

The install and subsequent migration went swimmingly. Everything that was supposed to be there was there, except the pre-installed Apps. I googled around for info about how to get them back and discovered that the smart folks at Apple had thought about just this situation. All I needed to to was log-in to the Mac App Store, click on Purchases and the new apps were all there — ready to be reinstalled (and associated with the login information). Whew.

An aside regarding the App Store: I had to create a new account for the user and this computer (corporate). I needed an account without a credit card, and the App Store did not offer this as an option. Google answered the question by informing me that iTunes does allow you to create a new account without a credit card (and of course, one Apple account works everywhere). Nice to know. A pro-tip for corporations is that you can setup user accounts this way, then GIFT credits to the account to buy apps.

After all that, I got a little play-time with the Mac mini. All I can say is… fast… wow! Such a tiny box driving such a huge display and it never blinked. The first thing the user did was crank up Lotus Notes (a pig of an app, and everyone in the group hates it). Even Notes was fast. Next she opened up Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator all at once — it took about 30 seconds total. Very nice. I want one.