recyclemac

Recently we have been seeing newer Macs – iMacs and Minis – that come with Apple’s Fusion Drive. What exactly is a Fusion Drive? Apple says, “Fusion Drive, a storage option on some iMac and Mac mini computers, combines a hard drive and flash storage in a single volume for improved performance and storage capacity.”

The issue we’ve found – twice now – is that this drive has been split so that it looks like a regular hard drive and a smaller SSD drive. The two Macs we came across (one an iMac, one a Mac Mini) were split into a One TB hard drive and a 200 GB SSD Drive.

Why they were split is a good question – the design of the drive is, as Apple says, to improve performance. Code that is used often is stored in the SSD so that it can be accessed rapidly. It certainly speeds up the boot process!

TUTORIALS

It turns out there are a number of good tutorials out there – including YouTube videos – to help you easily recombine your Fusion Drive.

The quickest way to find all the tutorials is to use your favorite search engine for “Repair Fusion Drive.” But if you just want to see what Apple says – you can go here. A software company called Stellar also has an easy-to-use tutorial here.

THE PROCESS

Essentially, the instructions will tell you to boot into the recovery drive of the the machine you are using with the split Fusion Drive and use Terminal to input a series of commands that will, ultimately, reintegrate the two split drives.

I took a slightly different route – I have an external drive (see above) with an OS that my Mac can boot into. I used El Capitan (10.11.6) but anything up to Catalina should work. Once booted into the external drive, you can just run Terminal from the Utilities folder and go from there (no need to use Recovery Drive). The benefit in my mind is that you are essentially working on your main Mac (and its split Fusion Drive) as if it were an external drive.

Once you’re in Terminal, follow the tutorial to identify the the two drives (diskutil list) and then process them to reintegrate as one drive. I captured the process from start to finish below so you can see what it actually looks like. The drives I wanted to work with were identified as disk0 and disk1.

Note those final commands at the end – Terminal does format the drive after it is recombined – and it won’t mount until that happens. So again -be sure to have a clone/Time Machine backup or you will lose all your data.

So there you have it! Let us know if you were able to follow the tutorials to successfully restore your Fusion Drive or if you have some other suggestions. Best way is to use the Contact Us page at MacRecycleClinic.org.