This month Apple refreshed the iMac range including the incredibly popular 27” range. However, there is one key decision you need to make when choosing your new machine.
It’s all to do with that Apple have slimmed down the flash storage in the 1TB Fusion Drive to just 24GB, down from its predecessors more respectable 128GB.
Fusion Drive is a combination of high-speed flash storage with a conventional hard drive. The flash part enables faster booting and application launches and OS X intelligently manages which files go where based on your usage patterns.
Here at Lease Loop all of the 27” iMacs that we lease come with a free upgrade to 16GB RAM, but a historically popular upgrade has been for customers to increase the RAM to 32GB. However, the with the new Fusion Drives shipping with just 24GB flash storage, leasing a 27-inch iMac with 32GB RAM means your computer will have more RAM than flash storage.
This could create some unwanted side-effects including it taking longer to wake from sleep on such configurations because RAM contents would simply be too big to fit on the Fusion Drive’s reduced flash storage.
In this situation the Fusion Drive will automatically save RAM contents that cannot fit on the flash storage onto the hard drive. However, because hard drives are much slower than flash storage, your iMac might take longer to wake from sleep.
The good news is that the 2 and 3TB Fusion Drives still come with 128GB Flash Storage meaning that a 32GB RAM upgrade is easily achievable. In fact there are plenty of internet sites stating that the new 27” iMac will successfully run on 64GB RAM. Either way you are safe with the 2 or 3TB Fusion Drive.
Apple acknowledges the situation, cautioning iMac buyers on its web store that iMac systems with 32GB of RAM “should be configured with a 2TB or larger Fusion Drive or all flash storage.”
