Can anyone explain the purpose of a 32 gig NVMe SSD? I think it’s quite an apple thing to install such a stupidly tiny drive into a computer, but on the other hand it doesn’t seem right. This can’t be a system drive can it? But what else could it be? This is like an impractical, high-speed USB drive that requires disassembly of the computer to remove…
It’s probably an SSD for a Fusion Drive setup: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive
It seems to check out for iMac in 2019.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Fusion Drive is a type of hybrid drive technology created by Apple Inc. It combines a hard disk drive with a NAND flash storage (solid-state drive of 24 GB or more) and presents it as a single Core Storage managed logical volume with the space of both drives combined. The operating system automatically manages the contents of the drive so the most frequently accessed files are stored on the faster flash storage, while infrequently used items move to or stay on the hard drive. For example, if spreadsheet software is used often, the software will be moved to the flash storage for faster user access. In software, this logical volume speeds up performance of the computer by performing both caching for faster writes and auto tiering for faster reads.
A wikipedia bot ? Great ! ❤️
Thanks.
You are the one who made it ? Then It’s me who should thank you ! Anything that improve lemmy is greatly appreciated.
Giving it a fancy name does not hide the fact it would be much better to replace the HDD with an SSD the same size. Typical Apple - marketing over substance.
Such a tiny storage space gave me a free netbook.
That netbook had 32GB, of which windows and office took about 27. Then windows decided it needed an update of 8GB. Game over, as the flash was soldered on the board.
Wiped windows, installed Linux and libreoffice and some extra things. Used about 5GB.
Fwiw, I had a tablet do this a couple years back. after opening it up again recently it looks like Windows created an option where you can still upgrade, but you have to plug in a flash drive so it has extra space to download the update. Then it patches the system and removes the windows.old file to free up space on the internal storage.
No need for that now. Windows is gone for good from that machine.
Early centrino laptops had a 16-32gig solid state drive in addition to mechanical disks purely to speed boost time. It was part of the spec in order to advertise Intel Centrino. SSD was too expensive to do the whole disk so just a simple operating system essentials raid type setup made booting incredibly fast for 2010 standards.
Interesting to see that Apple’s price to capacity ratio styed the same