November 13, 2012
Review: The Mac mini takes the Ivy Bridge to Fusion Town
Source: arstechnica.comThe littlest Mac of them all, the Mac mini, was updated in late October. The last time we took a look at the mini was in July 2011, when Ryan Paul examined the mini's suitability as a Home Theater PC (HTPC); he had some positive and some negative things to say about the shiny metal cuboid. The new mini improves on the old in several substantial ways, but the most notable thing about the latest revision is that it's currently the only Mac you can buy which comes equipped with Apple's Fusion Drive technology. Fusion Drive "fuses" together a solid state drive and a traditional spinning hard disk drive into a single volume, and does some interesting tricks to tier data between the two different physical drives.