A good amount more information has surfaced over at Ars Technica about Apple's new Fusion Drive.

Everything I read in this article sounds like good news. I no longer think there is a particular risk when using the technology, so long as I'm backed up regularly. I'm always backed up regularly, and you should be, too.

I'm surprised that it's possible to hook up external USB or Thunderbolt drives to your Mac and use them combined with an internal drive, as a Fusion Drive. But it's cool that it's possible. This may enable people with older Macs to benefit from the technology.

Furthermore, Fusion Drive works at the block level of the disks, below the file level. This essentially means that if you have a huge file of some kind but only want to regularly access a small part of it, the small part will be moved over to the SSD, but the rest will remain on the regular hard drive. Awesome.

It seems Apple has surprised us again; just like the A6 chip in the iPhone 5, a lot more work has gone into Fusion Drive than we (or at least I) initially assumed. Great stuff.

Pierre Igot writes about the possible risks early adopters may take when buying a new iMac with a Fusion Drive installed:

Do potential buyers of the new technology really need to worry about a higher-than-normal failure rate for the new drives and the fact that, while these failures can be fixed with software, the fix involves erasing the drive?

I don't think it's a bad sign that Apple has released some troubleshooting tips for the Fusion Drive. I'd suggest it might actually a good sign the support page exists so soon.

Even so, the technology behind Fusion Drive is new and should therefore be treated with caution. I'm in the market for an iMac and am now faced with a tough decision: which storage configuration do I choose?

My realistic¹ options are either:

• 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive,
• 1TB Fusion Drive,
• 768GB flash storage.

Unfortunately, pricing for these options hasn't been announced yet, so I'm not working with any solid numbers. I imagine the 768GB flash drive will be prohibitively expensive, leaving me with the choice of "risking" a first generation Fusion Drive or suffering with a slow, spinning hard drive. It strikes me as slightly strange that smaller SSD configurations aren't available—but perhaps the 512GB chips are all reserved for other Macs, or considered insufficient for a desktop computer.

Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised at the cost of the flash storage, but it looks like I'll be going with a 1TB Fusion Drive in December. I hope it really does deliver the best of both worlds.

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1: I don't need more than 1TB of storage, so I'm discounting the 3TB options.