Please stop the madness: The Mac’s Fusion Drive isn’t about caching

There was certain hubbub surrounding the launch of machines with Apple’s Fusion Drive Core Storage-based administration software. And much confusion. The word “caching” crept into the stories plus posts. The caching label appears to be sticking plus which is wrong.

I ran a look for “Fusion Drive” plus “caching” plus  found a lot of latest stories which describe the Fusion Drive because managing caching for a performance boost. Not.

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Instead, it’s an implementation of storage tiering. This was described inside a non-Apple, server-market context inside a Wednesday announcement by SSD development provider Enmotus.  The firm is phoning its automated information migration answer “micro-tiering.”

“Let’s clear up any remaining myths which tiering plus caching are synonymous,” mentioned Mark Peters, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “These are typically very different: tiering really creates a online pool of accessible storage, plus moves the many frequently utilized or even more active information to the quicker tier – that inside Enmotus’ case is flash, with all the solid-state capability being additive to the total storage pool.

Tiering is unlike caching, considering the latter merely creates a temporary copy quite utilized or active information inside the cache; with tiering, the SSD operates because main storage without requirement to ‘flush’ the cache, meaning less overhead plus lower wear found on the solid-state.

So, not caching. Tiering.