Preventing a Defective drive from Mounting

hi!

I have a late 2012 iMac with Fusion Drive. A year agothe HDD became defective and I was forced to split the Fusion drive between the HDD and SSD. Doing this allowed me to do a fresh install of macOS onto the SSD.

The problem now is every other boot up macOS detects the defective HDD and tries to mount it. This results in a slower boot time and login.

macOS would eventually give up and report that I should manually "eject" the defective drive before "unplugging it".

Now, is there a command where in macOS will not mount the defective HDD at boot?

I was toying around with installing a 10TB or 12TB HDD to replace the defective 1TB and make a new Fusion Drive but I fear breaking anything more.

I have the install kit from OWC to replace a drive but I am a bit hesitant.

 

macOS only sees the SSD. Platter drive isn't seen.

--- Post Merged, Sep 29, 2017 ---

Done and done