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Failed Fusion Drive (both drives)

Both drives in my fusion drive failed. Have sent them off for data recovery, but am trying to save on the repair. I want to replace the fusion drives with only a single, larger-volume SSD. My hubs has experience building PCs, but we're not sure what exactly needs to be done here. We've been confusing ourselves looking over guides like How can I switch from FusionDrive to SSD-PCIe only? one.

Since both drives failed, do we still need to split them in Terminal? Can we even access Terminal if the computer currently has no drives installed?

If we leave the flash slot empty and only replace the HDD with an SSD, is there anything else we need to do or will the Mac read the SSD just fine and ignore the empty connection?

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That was someone with a working system. As you claim yours is broken we need to be careful here if you want to save your data. And if you want to reconfigure your system then we can address that.

When I wrote that answer things have changed a bit. We now have a good source for the custom Apple blade SSD's and a good reference on what each system uses. Here's the reference: The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs. Don't go crazy here I'm just putting it out to you to get a better idea what your system has.

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Hold that thought!

Fusion Drives are similar to a mirrored drive set. All of the data is on the HDD. The SSD holds the cached version of the files from the HDD (copies). It’s only if the file is altered and was not able to copy back to the HDD that the SSD might have something different (very rare).

So… If the HDD is recoverable you’ll likely have everything maybe one file if the system crashed out just before the write action (a rare possibility). So you only need to ship the HDD for recovery.

As you didn’t tell us what happened you might not need to go that far! Can you tell us what happened and what have you done so far.

Update (07/29/2018)

I've never had to deal with this exact situation so I'm not sure. So, lets look at this logically, the system does have a NV RAM chip which holds settings so I would assume if I reset it the setting would be lost. So I would do that before installing the drive. To do that you'll plug in a bootable external drive and then do a reset with a USB wired keyboard. Here's how: Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac.

As you’re installed a new drive any settings the Fusion Drive had are gone now. The rest of the task is just install the drive!

Besides the SSD you’ll need a 2.5 to 3.5” adapter frame like: 2.5in SATA Hard Drive to 3.5in Drive Bay Mounting Kit we really only need the metal bracket and the screws. In addition to the frame you also need a in-line thermal sensor: OWC In-line Digital Thermal Sensor for Hard Drive Upgrade for 27" iMacs 2012 and Later It also has the needed display adhesive tapes. But! You will need some tools to take the display off without damaging it! Here’s what you need:

You still need a bootable USB thumb drive to boot the system and install the OS here’s how to do this: How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive. You’ll note I’ve pointed to the Sierra setup I would recommend you still with this release until Apple fixes APFS when running on SATA drives, which hopefully is in this falls release.

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The technician doing the data recovery said he needed both so I sent them both in. He said my case was rare and the SSD is not recoverable/nonresponsive but HDD is recoverable but they will not have any file/folder structure.

I want to try to get the repair started in the meantime as I'm not sure how long the recovery is going to take.

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Where did you send it?

And can you fill us in on what happened.

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I sent it to Data Savers in Atlanta, GA. Two weeks ago my computer started running extremely slow randomly and it became impossible to do anything as every application would crash and every click took 5 mins to register. I took it to Apple and they weren't able to give me a proper diagnosis but told me to bring it to an Apple Service Provider who would be able to recover my data. They told me the HDD was failing but the SSD was ok so they started doing the recovery but it was going super slow. They were only able to recover 45 GB out of 1tb in 6 days. On the 6th day I sent it to Data Savers and when they received the drives they told me both of the had failed. This form of data recovery is much more expensive so I was hoping we could replace the drives our selves and save $300+.

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If you have a backup of what you need then you can just replace the drives.

The direction you take here is if you go back to a Fusion Drive config (I would recommend not). Then going with either a single drive or dual drive config.

As you've already pulled the drives I would just put in one of the custom blade SSD's which would give you the biggest bang. But, then again you need to look at your wallet ;-}

Putting in a 2.5" SSD drive replacing the 3.5" HDD your system had will also work, its just slower.

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I'm leaning towards a 2.5" ssd. So if we installed that, would we need to do some kind of special coding to tell it there is only one drive now since it used to be a fusion?

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I want to remove my fusion drive all together as well. Can I just leave it out and boot from a bootable thumb drive, or is there code you have to add in Terminal? Please list the steps I need to take. Thanks!

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While you can remove the drives (both in this case) using a thumb drive doesn't make much sense.

You have the systems thermal monitoring (SMC) to deal with as pulling the drives means it will not have the needed thermal sensor so your system will go into Fail Safe Mode running the fan at full speed and reduce the CPU's clocking.

OS you'll need to put something in to place of drives

How about explaining what your reasons are as well as tell us what your usage is.

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