OntheRez Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Jeff,
SSD > platter. Any way you measure it. This is a newer technology that way out-classes the older one. I can't imagine anyone offering you advice here that would disagree with this. The Apple fusion drive uses the SSD that's married to a standard (7200 rpm I believe) 2TB platter. The SSD part is really a (very) sophisticated pre-fetch cache. It is faster than just a plain platter. It is nowhere near as fast as a real SSD. Again, this comes from my comparing a current 27" i7, 32GB RAM, 512 SSD, 4GB GPU with my partner's nearly identical iMac with the fusion drive. Only difference is the "lesser" CPU. Lr pulls files, saves, and executes significantly faster. Hands down.
You mention using the 2TB fusion drive to hold all you pix, but I gather you back up to external drives thus not you don't loses much if the main drive goes TU. As you note platter drives are proven, reliable, and inexpensive (now). In 25+ years I don't think I've seen more than a half dozen truly fail. (This ignores IBM's CMS drive disaster some years back.)
So is it cost effective? Like I said earlier, I'm sure the fusion drive will work fine, and you'll like the improved performance. However, if you've never directly experienced just how much faster the SSD is then you don't really have a reference for your cost/benefit analysis. SSD tech isn't new and is well proven. Think about it. No moving parts. No moving parts. You obviously have some engineering back ground and we all know the more parts in motion, the greater likelihood of failure.
OWC has a nice USB-3 case that will take up to 4 drives. (I think they have a cheaper 2 drive model.) Last drives I bought were Toshiba "enterprise" rated 2TB drives. They were $54@. Thus you can build an external use and/or backup system for far less than you've calculated.
Which is right for you? Shrug. Obviously your call, but I'll never buy another main drive that is not SSD and I'll keep the TB RAID 0 pair as first line storage.
Robert
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