
Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac’s Dead SSD - yhoiseth
https://tidbits.com/2020/04/27/six-lessons-learned-from-dealing-with-an-imacs-dead-ssd/
======
drewg123
Lesson #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.

~~~
correct_horse
I agree, but I think this lesson needs qualification.

If you know how to diagnose a bad drive and replace it, don't buy an iMac. The
vast majority of people would need to bring a broken computer into a repair
shop to replace the drive, even if that computer were a PC with a highly
accessible solid state drive. I won't ever buy a mac again, but it makes sense
for some people to do so.

~~~
incompatible
Presumably the repair shop will charge more if the job on the iMac takes 5
times as long and risks damaging the screen.

------
therealmarv
I 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.

~~~
phs318u
Wow. It must be the time of year. My MBA13's SSD also died a few weeks ago. I
just ordered an OWC replacement (and battery too). However, I'm only going to
restore macOS long enough to move my TimeMachine backup (/home only) into
something readable by Linux. Catalina was the last straw for me. At the moment
I'm writing this having installed UbuntuStudio on the SDXC card. The drive is
deathly slow compared to SSD but it's working.

EDITED to add: I'm doing some homework to identify my next laptop. It won't be
an Apple. Ideally something with an aluminium chassis, 13" screen, 32GB RAM,
and 512GB SSD. i7 or AMD equivalent. Suggestions welcome!

~~~
willtim
Why specify aluminium? For example, Magnesium alloy is 30% lighter and less
prone to warps and dents. For Linux, I would consider a ThinkPad (T or X
series) or a Dell XPS developer edition.

~~~
phs318u
Aluminium was my lazy way of saying non-plastic. I’d rather it dint than
crack.

Thanks for the tips.

------
userbinator
_That 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_
At 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.

------
pronoiac
Mojave isn't searchable in the Mac App Store, but direct links work:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-
mojave/id1398502828?ls...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-
mojave/id1398502828?ls=1&mt=12)

I'd download that to another computer and make a bootable usb drive.

------
bitL
Can'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
I 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
Here'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
> 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
Apple 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
It's kind of annoying that the OS X Mountain Lion update that I paid for is no
longer available from the App Store…

~~~
mrpippy
From the App Store app on a 10.13 machine, all of the 10.7-10.11 updates show
up in Purchased for me

~~~
saagarjha
You have the old App Store. The new one doesn't show it…

------
codebook
So, 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
NUC 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)

------
bluedino
>> 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
During a pandemic? The screenshots show the hardware failure was 2020-04-15 so
it's not like you can just ignore current conditions :)

~~~
bluedino
Best Buy will bring your purchases out to your car...

------
lazyjones
I 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).

------
formercoder
Reasons to never restore from backup. Keep your data in the cloud and
reinstall OS’s from scratch.

~~~
Lammy
Have you ever tried to restore several terabytes of data from the cloud? How
long did it take?

~~~
lazyjones
You 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...

