![]() If you are unsure of how big an SSD your Fusion Drive has, this is a quick method of finding out. You can see this if you open Disk Utility on a Mac with a Fusion Drive: it is reported as ‘CoreStorage Logical Volume Group’, and the space on it is given as the total capacities of the SSD and hard drive. OS X then sees the Fusion Drive not as two separate disks, but a single storage device, using the relatively new Core Storage feature. In the latest iMacs, their 1 TB Fusion drives may only have 24 GB SSDs, which is still sufficient to provide good acceleration, if you are not a heavy user of large apps. In most cases, when you buy a Mac with a Fusion Drive, it comes with a 120/128 GB SSD and a hard drive of 1-3 TB. And that is exactly what Apple’s Fusion Drive is: hybrid storage. So if you want a lot of storage, the ideal combination is an SSD, on which you keep OS X, often-used apps, and key documents, and a larger hard drive for the rest. It is an expensive overhead to store infrequently-accessed documents and apps on an SSD, and far more efficient to keep those on a hard disk, where speed of access is of little importance. Some of that investment in an SSD is more effective than the rest. The snag is that their storage remains expensive: a 1 TB hard disk is around £50, but as an SSD it will cost you about £500. We would all love to be able to leave hard drives behind, and just to use SSDs. So if El Capitan is sluggish and you are tired of the beachball being a constant companion, the biggest single improvement which you can make is to switch to a Mac with a Fusion Drive, or SSD. Use the same plan with El Capitan, and it no longer seems sufficient: even common, everyday actions seem to take longer, unless you are running OS X and major apps from a solid-state disk (SSD), or one of Apple’s Fusion Drives, which incorporates an SSD with a hard disk. Plenty of free disk space allowed OS X to write its secret cache files to large chunks of contiguous disk space, so anything that did end up cached to disk was quick to access. ![]() Ample memory meant that apps did not have to keep much cached to disk, and you could happily run many services and apps at once, without any significant performance hit. It is easy to blame El Capitan, but the problem, and its resolution, is more complex and more deep-seated than that.īefore El Capitan, accelerating OS X and its apps was a matter of throwing plenty of memory and loads of free hard disk space at them. Apps which used to load briskly and run like the wind seem to be struggling, slow to load, and pausing at times. ![]() A lot of users who have upgraded to El Capitan have noticed poor performance – on Macs which never used to display the spinning beachball cursor, it is now a frequent companion.
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