Apple Inc (AAPL) Sheds Some Light On Fusion Drive, New Schematics

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) is in the middle of a wild week. On Tuesday, the company held its highly anticipated product release show, and gave its audience of 1,200 or so techies much to blog about. Led by CEO Tim Cook and senior VP Phil Schiller, Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) spilled the beans on iBooks 3.0, the iPad Mini, the Mac Mini, and the oh so sweet Fusion Drive. Here’s a clip from the first story we broke about the system:

No, its not a spaceship engine built for interstellar travel; the Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) Fusion Drive combines Flash and HDD memory formats into one unique system. Announced at the conclusion of Schiller’s speech about the iMac, the Fusion Drive offers 128 GB of flash storage and the choice between a 1 TB or 3 TB hard drive, with automatic integration into OS X Mountain Lion.

Essentially, the first we’d heard of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s Fusion Drive was on Tuesday, but the company offered up some more details on its official website today. Best of all, they were in FAQ format. We’ve cherry picked a few good ones for you. Here’s the entire list. Enjoy:

Do I need to configure Fusion Drive?
When ordered with a Fusion Drive, your iMac or Mac mini is pre-configured.

Can external USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt hard drives be added to Fusion Drive?
External drives cannot be added to Fusion Drive.

Can I add a partition to the hard disk with Fusion Drive?
Using Disk Utility, you can add one partition to the hard disk on Fusion Drive. Once you add the partition, the “plus” symbol in Disk Utility to add additional partitions will be grayed out. You cannot partition the Flash storage.

Can a Fusion Drive be mounted on another system in Target Disk Mode?
Yes, but the system attempting to mount the Fusion Drive in Target Disk Mode must have OS X Mountain Lion version 10.8.2 or later. A Fusion Drive will not appear as a Target Disk Mode volume or startup disk on earlier versions of Mac OS X.

Note: all italicized FAQs are originally found on Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s website, and are quotations of such.

Aside from this post, Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) also added a few interesting schematics for case designers to their website on Wednesday, including plans for the 4th generation iPad:

Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) also released plans for the iPad Mini:

While the slides Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) provided on Tuesday were helpful, these schematics give eager techies all of the details they may have missed. Both tablets go on preorder this Friday, October 26th. For more updates on Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), continue reading Insider Monkey, and check out the rest of our Apple coverage here.