Apple Inc.(NASDAQ:AAPL)’s new Fusion Drive to give it an edge over competition

Apple Inc.(NASDAQ:AAPL)’s launch event on Tuesday, though ostensibly for the iPad Mini, also saw a host of other devices being unveiled by the company.

One of the interesting which came up was the Fusion Drive, which combines the high performance of the NAND flash with the storage capacity of a hard disk drive.

The Fusion Drive will be installed in the new iMac and Mac Mini desktops, which it unveiled yesterday. Apple said that its operating system and the pre-installed applications will run on SSD by default while the documents and media will run on the HDD.

The storage capacity of the Fusion Drive will be either 1 terra byte or 3 TB but has been cleverly designed so that it appears as a single storage volume. Combined with the storage capacity of 128 GB of the NAND flash drive this gives Apple a definite edge ahead of the competition.

According to Apple the fusion drive's performance is similar to that a pure solid state drive but with the mass storage capacity and the lower costs associated with a HDD.

According to Tech World, "based on the amount of flash capacity offered by Apple, industry analysts do not believe the Fusion Drive is a hybrid drive, which combines flash and spinning disk in a hard drive form factor." 

Apple's Fusion Drive most likely comes from its purchase of Anobit, which it acquired in 2011, while the HDD is sourced from Seagate.