2014 5K iMac Hard Drive replacement

[crawdad62]

So on Tuesday the 8th I ordered a new Studio to replace my 2014 5K iMac. It has worked wonderful until this week. I was streaming music to my stereo when all of a sudden the music stopped. When I checked the iMac had kernel panicked and froze. So when I rebooted I got the prohibitive sign. I booted into Recovery and it doesn’t show the drive. It does however show the Fusion partition. Pretty sure the drive failed. Weird though the hardware test showed no problems. Anyway I was planning on selling the iMac when my Studio comes but now I’ve got a HD with data on it. I’m kind of stuck. So I figured I’d just replace the hard drive. I want to replace it with a spinning drive since I’m selling it. My question is what drive (1TB) and is the Fusion part of the drive?

 

[ignatius345]

Anyway I was planning on selling the iMac when my Studio comes but now I’ve got a HD with data on it. I’m kind of stuck. So I figured I’d just replace the hard drive. I want to replace it with a spinning drive since I’m selling it. My question is what drive (1TB) and is the Fusion part of the drive?

I really doubt the data is recoverable, but I can see why you'd want to be totally sure. I'm not sure whether the SSD or HDD on yours failed, but either way I believe all the data is probably toast because MacOS basically merges both devices into one volume.

I had exactly the same 2014 iMac 5K you have and had a Fusion Drive about to fail a couple years ago. The SSD part was at like 1% of its life left according to a couple disk utilities I looked at (turns out those SSDs in Fusion Drives get absolutely hammered with read/write cycles). Anyway, I opened the machine up and replaced the spinning HDD with an SATA SSD. I got a kit with all the necessary tools and parts from iFixit, laid it all out on the kitchen table and had at it. Took maybe 2 hours, much of which was spent carefully removing the old adhesive from the display so I could fit the new adhesive strips cleanly. A definite PITA, but doable if you're patient and careful.

If you're selling the machine, I'd say just put an SATA SSD in. They're dirt cheap these days and the iMac will have a way better shot at remaining useful for a few more years. The new APFS file system that MacOS has used the past few years is really optimized for SSDs and it's just going to be dog slow if you put a spinning HDD in it -- especially since it'll no longer have that boost from the SSD part of the Fusion Drive it formerly had. As a bonus, if it turns out your built-in 128GB SSD from the Fusion Drive is still good, that can be mounted right alongside the SATA SSD for some extra storage.

 

[glenthompson]

Even with the drive replaced you’re unlikely to sell it for more than $300 or so. Hardly seems worth it to go to that trouble and expense. A cheaper approach might be to use an external SSD as a boot drive. A WD 1tb drive is $49 while the Samsung T5 is $80 for a 500gb. I have a Mac Mini running off a T5 and it’s significantly faster than the internal drive.

 

[Fishrrman]

I agree with glen above.
Forget about spending much $$$ trying to fix the iMac's internal drive (be aware that when prying open one of these, other things inside can be easily broken during the "repair").

Instead, get an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD, plug that in, and create "an external boot drive".
If the internal HDD cannot be revived, just leave it, "dead, but in place".

 

[crawdad62]

All good suggestions. I just don’t want it. I don’t need a second computer sitting around. I’m going to replace it.