Something quite strange has just happened. A while ago, my late 15 iMac suffered internal drive failure, 2tb fusion. It was running El Capitan and I had a Time Machine backup so completely wiped the drive. Booting up the machine would not recognise the internal volumes at all so I set up an external temporary HD from which I could boot. Again, none of the internal drives could be seen on the desktop. I upgraded the boot disk to Monterey for giggles. On restarting, now all of the volumes are visible and there are both an HD and an SSD icon showing on the desktop. The SSD drive is very fast compared to the HDD as you’d expect. Previously there was only ever a single volume icon which I guess encompassed both volumes. I have been able to run Disk First Aid on both volumes and both report the media being fine! Lazarus lives!!! In the first instance, what would I need to do to get the drive back in its original state, ie just showing the one ‘fusion hybrid’ volume on the desktop?
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Drive back from the dead…
- Thread starter dazzer21-2
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I would not "re-fuse" the drives.
I'd let them exist from now on as individual, "stand-alone" drives.
What size is the SSD?
Is it 128gb?
If so, you could turn it into a small (but still functional) and speedy boot drive.
It should have:
- OS
- Applications
- Basic Accounts
By "basic" accounts, you can put the "large libraries" that would normally be found inside the user folder elsewhere. An example might be the Photos library or the iTunes music folder (I don't know what it's called now that iTunes has changed into "Music").
Because it's small, the goal is to keep it "lean and clean", with enough free space on it for the OS to function smoothly.
Use the internal HDD for storing such libraries, and for other storage.
The EXTERNAL drive you now boot from -- is it an SSD or an HDD?
If it's an HDD, the internal drive will boot/run much faster.
If it's an SSD, just keep it to be your "alternate boot drive". It's ALWAYS advisable to have a second boot drive around somewhere.
I'd let them exist from now on as individual, "stand-alone" drives.
What size is the SSD?
Is it 128gb?
If so, you could turn it into a small (but still functional) and speedy boot drive.
It should have:
- OS
- Applications
- Basic Accounts
By "basic" accounts, you can put the "large libraries" that would normally be found inside the user folder elsewhere. An example might be the Photos library or the iTunes music folder (I don't know what it's called now that iTunes has changed into "Music").
Because it's small, the goal is to keep it "lean and clean", with enough free space on it for the OS to function smoothly.
Use the internal HDD for storing such libraries, and for other storage.
The EXTERNAL drive you now boot from -- is it an SSD or an HDD?
If it's an HDD, the internal drive will boot/run much faster.
If it's an SSD, just keep it to be your "alternate boot drive". It's ALWAYS advisable to have a second boot drive around somewhere.
Update. Having looked it up, the fusion part of the drive should be 24GB. The secondary volume being shown is 120GB (the drive wasn’t partitioned). The larger volume is read/write at about 120mbps. The smaller one is at around 600mbps. 🤔