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Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac’s Dead SSD
- codebook 6y agoSo, I normally don't use AIO desktop, which in general use soldered RAM/ disks in these days. Yes, you can get extra space on your desk but the handling of the errors are quite bothersome. For laptop, someone may use laptop as a main system, but for me it is substitute, so I don't bother whether it fails or not, and fortunately, I didn't see the failure on my rMBP, XPS, or even chromebook yet.
- bitL 6y agoNUC mounted to the back of the display with an USB/TB3 hub/dock exposed to the desktop is a superior alternative to AIO desktops. One could choose way better displays than what AIO typically has (like EIZO or some curved ultrawide)
- formercoder 6y agoReasons to never restore from backup. Keep your data in the cloud and reinstall OS’s from scratch.
- Lammy 6y agoHave you ever tried to restore several terabytes of data from the cloud? How long did it take?
- incompatible 6y agoSounds like the data is stored only on the cloud. I would have trouble working that way. You'd also want to make a backup somewhere else, in case the cloud provider loses it.
- lazyjones 6y agoYou can use https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html and have them ship you a HDD with your data in case of failure. If you're OK with not encrypting your backup...
- userbinator 6y agoThat was concerning, so I finished what I was doing, restarted in macOS Recovery by rebooting while holding down Command-R, launched Disk Utility, started First Aid, went to make dinner, and promptly forgot about it. One thing I've learned over the years is that if you suspect a hardware failure, especially to the boot drive, there's a very good chance that a reboot is not going to succeed. As the article shows, the "true end" came not long after that. Good that he has backups, and that's probably why he could even forget about it. The drive supposedly has 128 MB of cache memory, but it’s only 5400 rpm, and while its speed has never been a noticeable problem while making backups, it’s painful beyond belief to use as a boot drive. USB 3.0 might theoretically be capable of 625 MBps, but when I tested the drive in Blackmagic Speed Test, it averaged just 20–25 MBps for both read and write speeds. Maybe SSDs have spoiled us, but I'm still surprised just how much disk activity newer OSes produce, especially upon boot; or perhaps it's just the non-default stuff loaded upon startup by apps, which can easily build up without affecting performance if you normally have an ultra-fast SSD. I know someone who used a regular USB flash drive (probably <10MB/s) with a "portable" copy of XP for several years as a basic minimal development environment, and it wasn't actually slower than a HDD of the time; in fact, it was quite responsive, probably due to the much better random read performance of flash vs. a spinning disk.
- tom_ 6y agoAt some point, I strongly suspect, Apple upgraded all their OS development employees to SSDs, and they just stopped caring about HD performance. I don't know when that was exactly. 9-10 years ago or thereabouts? I just quite distinctly remember the experience of upgrading the OS, and straight away finding that the boot time had gone from 15 seconds to 1 minute :( That was annoying back then, but I don't think it's a problem nowadays. Technology has moved on, just as it moved on from the floppy disk and the Pentium 3 and so on. If anything, mechanical hard drives are doing well to still be useful - the price/performance/capacity tradeoff remains decent! Just not decent enough to use one as your boot drive.
- bluedino 6y ago>> I tested the drive in Blackmagic Speed Test, it averaged just 20–25 MBps for both read and write speeds. I found this odd. My 2.5" Seagate and WD external USB 3.0 HDD will both run 120MBs+ using Black Magic. Not that it would be something you would want to use as an OS boot drive, you'd want the Samsung T5 SSD that the author ended up buying.
- therealmarv 6y agoI resurrected my old Macbook Air 2013 last weekend with a replacement SSD (the last one failed totally with nearly no warning). In the meantime I had some longer Ubuntu laptop time as a short term replacement. Kudos to the software Carbon Copy Cloner. Everything is as before and lost only 4 weeks of data because of an old image (but that's okay, not super important). Lessons learned: - Test your backup strategy and your backups !! - External APFS or HFS drives cannot be read by Linux (especially if encrypted with FileVault). Maybe I will switch to Veracrypt + NTFS (or FAT32) for external drives in the long-run. - Restoring in recovery mode from a sparseimage did not worked out. A real 1:1 copy on an external drive is better and immediately bootable. - Installing macOS Mojave on a bigger USB stick is slooow (3 hours?), the same goes for booting, but it seemed the only option for me to use Carbon Copy Cloner to restore to the internal ssd. - Do more regular backups - Maybe monitoring the internal SSDs health in future? The software drivedx looks interesting. - side note on Linux: pinch and zoom gesture on trackpads is totally non existent on Linux desktop (even Windows is better with this). There are not even interfaces for it as far as I've seen.
- mobilio 6y agoCCC already save mine life two times!
- TENACIOUSANT 6y agoCCC absolute lifesaver and worth the money every time
- thelittleone 6y agoI had mistakenly assumed my MBP 2015 SSD was removable / replaceable but turns out Apple started soldering the SSD to the motherboard and in doing so eliminated perhaps the most bulletproof disaster recovery strategies in the cosmos... a USB caddy. Instead they put a proprietary SSD access port on the logic board for accessing the SSD. And in the case of my dead 2015 MBP, that port was unable to access the SSD. Bravo apple.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoThe 2015 Macbook Pro? As in, it has Magsafe and Thunderbolt 2? You can indeed remove and replace the SSD, all you need is one of these adapters and then you can put in any M.2 NVMe you want. I'm using an Intel 660p in my '15 MBP, I can answer any questions you have about the upgrade process. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2016-2013-2015/dp/B07FYY3H5F https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2016-201...
- drewg123 6y agoLesson #7: Don't buy an iMac Seriously. Why would you ever buy a computer that you need to remove the screen from to replace a part like an HDD with a high failure rate? I have a friend with a 2011 27" iMac that uses thunderbolt 1. It has an absurdly slow HDD. I was going to try to help her upgrade it, but I can't find a TB1 enclosure to put an SSD into. The other choice is FW800, and those are incredibly rare too. I'm actually shopping for these as we speak, so reading this article was very timely.. EDIT: Finally found a FW800 SATA 2.5" enclosure on Amazon that I can pop an SSD into. Sadly it was more expensive than a cheap SSD.
- slhlk3h5klh 6y agoI've upgraded that particular model. You can use something like this to replace the internal disk: https://www.ebay.com/itm/123514199917 https://www.ebay.com/itm/123514199917 Removing the screen cover is easy - all you need is a couple suction cups: https://www.ebay.com/itm/323959879241 https://www.ebay.com/itm/323959879241
- drewg123 6y agoI'm not going to try to remove the screen, I'm sorry. I don't mind turning screws, but I'm not going to mess with glass and glue and stuff. I'm clumsy and afraid I'll break something just by looking at it wrong. Especially on something that isn't mine.
- lonelappde 6y agoScrews are much more delicate than glass. Screws strip very easily, making it impossible to remove the connection.
- throwanem 6y agoPhilips heads strip unusually easily because the driver will fit, but then cam out damaging the drive, if you use the wrong driver size or too little pressure. Or if it's actually a JIS or Pozidriv, and you're using a Philips driver because you don't know better, or the proper sets are expensive, or the size and type you need is in the same place all your 10mm sockets are. Most other drives don't have most of these problems. Even with the infamous Pentalobe, as long as you get the size right, it's pretty hard to screw up.
- bluedino 6y ago>> I ordered it directly from Samsung to avoid Amazon shipping delays and got it two days later. Do people no longer go to Best Buy, Staples, Micro Center...?
- Lammy 6y agoDuring a pandemic? The screenshots show the hardware failure was 2020-04-15 so it's not like you can just ignore current conditions :)
- bluedino 6y agoBest Buy will bring your purchases out to your car...
- pronoiac 6y agoHe's trying to shelter in place.
- brailsafe 6y agoI would gladly avoid all of them. They're upsetting places to be, their employees are apparently trained like garbage and probably underpaid, and their return policy sucks. The experience end-to-end in any of the stores is largely unpleasant. BestBuy delivering to the parking lot is the best experience they could provide. I hope they go out of business in favour of smaller companies that do electronics retail better.
- soylentcola 6y agoMicro Center has always seemed decent to me. True, they have a few annoyances: their staff seems to work on commission which probably sucks for them, and they always try to get my personal info for marketing when I check out, but it's still the closest thing to a Newegg catalog in brick-and-mortar form.
- brailsafe 6y agoI actually didn't notice Micro Center in the list. Haven't been there myself, so really speak to the experience.
- pronoiac 6y agoMojave isn't searchable in the Mac App Store, but direct links work: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-mojave/id1398502828?ls=1&mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-mojave/id1398502828?ls... I'd download that to another computer and make a bootable usb drive.
- bitL 6y agoCan't wait to see glued thin M.2 SSD envelopes at the bottom/back of MacBook Pros with U-shaped USB-C connectors in one of the ports once the recent models' SSDs start failing...
- wtallis 6y agoI think most current models will experience some other hardware failure before their flash memory really starts to wear out. Most SSD failures that consumers experience are catastrophic firmware bugs that are largely unrelated to flash memory endurance, which is why they seem unpredictable. Assuming Apple's homegrown SSD controller technology has been rigorously tested against what their own OS will do to the drive, they should be no more prone to such failures than top-tier retail SSD brands. Barring that failure mode, the batteries, displays, discrete GPUs and DRAM probably all have expected lifespans that are no longer than the SSDs.
- brailsafe 6y agoHere's hoping, though I had a colleague recently have his retail boot SSD burnout after thrashing it during some development on automated testing. It happens, and if it does, owners are fucked. Big bet imo
- bsder 6y ago> I had a copy of the Mojave installer available, but when I booted using the MacBook Air in Target Disk Mode, it was running Catalina, and wouldn’t let me install Mojave because it was too old. The whole Apple "We won't let you install old OS's" and "Good luck finding an old OS install image. Ha! Ha!" infuriates me. I don't want to have to go trawling through Warez sites just to find a version of OS X compatible with a 5 year old computer.
- mrpippy 6y agoApple has working installers for 10.10 and up linked here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208052 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208052
- saagarjha 6y agoIt's kind of annoying that the OS X Mountain Lion update that I paid for is no longer available from the App Store…
- yardie 6y agoYou don’t need to go to water sites. The installers are in the App Store just hidden. I have a link somewhere to the Apple support KB with the AppStore links to their previous OSes. But they really want you to run the latest OS and make it abundantly clear they don’t want you to even think about old hardware.
- lazyjones 6y agoI use a Transcend JetDrive 855 with a 2015 iMac 5K. It's expensive, but does the job and is very fast (Thunderbolt 10 Gb/s and internally M.2 PCIe).