Is my Fusion drive recoverable?

[pavinder]

Hi, wondering if anyone might be able to help.

My late 2013 iMac's 4TB fusion drive seemed to die during a system update a few years ago, and since then I began booting from an external SSD.

Recently I noticed some threads helping others fix Fusion drives, such as: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/screwed-up-1tb-fusion-drive-2017-imac.2060421/

Encouraged, I tried to fix mine in Internet Recovery mode but couldn't get it to work. I'm wondering if my drive is actually completely screwed.

The following points are related to the photos I've attached.

1. Disk Utility is showing 2 drives: the SSD as 121GB, and the other as only 4GB.
2. Internet Recovery asked me if I wanted to set up the fusion drive again. I chose to Fix.
3. That process failed.
4. Back in Disk Utility after rebooting from the external drive, the SSD drive details are shown.
5. The non-SSD drive details are shown.
6. First aid was successful.
7. Trying to erase the disk was not successful.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Weaselboy]

From what you are showing there, it does look like the hard drive part of that Fusion drive is dead.

 

[pavinder]

As I suspected...thanks for the confirmation.

 

[Juicy Box]

I'm not sure if it is still happening, but Apple had a repair program on 2TB and larger Fusion Drives. It might be worth looking up your SN and seeing what is available.

I have a 1TB Fusion Drive on my Late 2012 iMac that failed, and wasn't covered under the repair program, but luckily I decided to get Apple Care for the first time ever, so it was replaced for free.

The downside was that I was having issues with it for months, but Apple refused to replace the Drive since it passed the Apple Store HW diagnostic test. It finally fully broke 12 days before the AC warranty was up.

 

[Lioness~]

I would try some other disk repairing / rebuilding apps before deciding it’s dead.
Not sure disk utility is always the best.
Not sure I know what’s going in with your disk either. Weaselboy might be right.
But I would at least try DiskWarrior or TechToolPro or something else to see what they report.
At least TTP have a test version if you don’t have another disk repair app.

 

[Fishrrman]

My guess:
The SSD portion is fine, but the 4tb HDD has failed.

As mentioned above, Apple had a replacement program for some factory-defective 3tb HDDs in these models. I'm not sure if the 4tb drive qualified or not, but it might be worth asking. This program may be over and done by now.

Where to go from where you are?
Well, if it was me, I wouldn't put a lot of money into it.

I'd probably just leave the 4tb drive "dead, in place", if it's not disturbing other things you do.

I'd set the internal SSD up to be the boot drive -- as a 128gb standalone SSD -- and use external storage for things that won't fit on the SSD.

I'm going to -guess- that the internal SSD is considerably faster than a USB/SATA SSD.
I wouldn't really know until I tested them.
But if it IS faster, it would be better as the boot drive.

 

[gian8989]

Check the hdd status with DriveDx.

 

[vkd]

If you open Terminal there is a command 'diskutil', that has various options, if you just type the command name and press return you will see them. You can easily use that to properly verify and/or fix your HDD.

If I was you, I would go to https://discussions.apple.com/welcome and place your questions there, I for one have had great experiences with amazing tech support there, there are some really clued-up, highly knowledgeable people who can help you out.

Not wanting to disrespect the MacRumors crowd, tho'.

 

[pl1984]

I would dispose of it, no use risking data loss and further hassle on it.

 

[bplein]

I trust the other experienced people who have already responded that your HDD is probably dead. If it were ME, I'd try a last ditch attempt at rescuing it, via a forced write at a low level using "dd".

If you aren't Terminal/CLI friendly, don't attempt it however. I won't give you the command line to kill yourself. What I would do is use dd to write 5GB of nulls to the beginning of the raw drive (/dev/rdiskX). If that works, it will show up as Uninitialized and you can try again.