Fusion Drive failure/Recovering data

The clicking sound is the hard drive failing very badly. No standard apps or utilities....even data recovery utilities will help now since they are unable to deal with the errors being produced by the failing hard drive and any attempts will just make the failure even worse. While I have successfully recovered data from such a failing hard drive, it is extremely risky...I was amazed I was even successful since most times it is impossible.

If you need data recovered from this Fusion Drive, then you need to contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers. You need to be extremely careful with a Fusion Drive since if the Fusion Drive setup is broken (that is the SSD or the hard drive is powered on without the other immediately available, the Fusion Drive setup is broken...aka split making data recovery most likely impossible). Since the hard drive is already making noises, there is a good chance the hard drive issue will cause the Fusion Drive to split. Power off the iMac immediately to prevent this and to prevent further wear on the hard drive. Drive Savers does provide free estimates. Even Drive Savers may not be able to recover any data from this Fusion Drive. If you do send the Fusion Drive (both the SSD & hard drive portions) out to Drive Savers.....I would highly recommend putting a note on each drive that they are part of a Fusion Drive.

Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the data on your Fusion drive is likely gone forever. Not to lecture you but if you were using Time Machine then all of your data would be intact. If the computer is a 2017 or newer then consider replacing the Fusion drive with an external SSD.

The SSD I'd recommend is the https://www.digitalcare.org/fix-error-code-36-mac/ and follow the directions in Setup external SSD as startup drive to get it setup.

If your computer is a pre-2017 iMac then just replace it.

If you were using Time Machine then get the external SSD and install it and you can use Migration Assistant to restore your apps and data.

Finally, if you still want to try to get data off of your Fusion drive then you can contact a data recovery service however please be prepared to spend $10K + to get some of your data back.

If you don't have a Time Machine backup and are not aware of Time Machine then please click and read Back up your Mac with Time Machine which will require a good quality External Hard Disk. I'd recommend an OWC Mercury Elite Pro.

Best of luck!

All hard drives fail and as you likely know a Fusion Drive is a combination of a very small SSD and a hard drive. It isn't a matter of if they will fail, it is a matter of when which sometimes is completely unpredictable. Also, the HD's that Apple used were NOT made by Apple, they were made by a variety of supplies. All Mac's since about model year 2020 have come exclusively with SSDs which offer many benefits over Fusion Drives and traditional HD based systems. Those benefit include speed which frequently is orders of magnitude faster than a HD based system, also reliability as there are no moving parts.

On your system, you can take the Fusion Drive (meaning the HD portion) out of the equation and use an external SSD as your boot drive. The benefits will be reliability and speed. If you have any interest in this then click How to setup an external SSD as your startup disk and the SSD I'd recommend is the OWC Envoy Pro EX Thunderbolt 3.

rkaufmann87 wrote:

On your system, you can take the Fusion Drive (meaning the HD portion) out of the equation and use an external SSD as your boot drive. The benefits will be reliability and speed. If you have any interest in this then click How to setup an external SSD as your startup disk and the SSD I'd recommend is the OWC Envoy Pro EX Thunderbolt 3.

Hopefully the dead Fusion Drive is not throwing errors that will crash the Mac even when the Mac is booted from an external drive.

rkaufmann87 wrote:

Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the data on your Fusion drive is likely gone forever. Not to lecture you but if you were using Time Machine then all of your data would be intact.

He said that "Unfortunately, about a month before, the external drive I used as a Time Machine backup also failed and I hadn't replaced it yet."

I purchased my iMac 27 on April 2019. My 3 TB fusion drive broke on February 2022. So I had to have the genius bar replace it and I paid about $350 or so two weeks ago, I had another problem with the fusion drive and spending one hour with Apple support. We found that this second fusion Drive also failed yesterday. I brought the computer into the local Apple Store and they also verified that the fusion Drive is broken now I didn’t use the iMac 27 for, almost 7 months because I was on vacation. So in essence I only use this second fusion drive for about 17 months now I would think an Apple product with the fusion should last more than 17 months. Is there an ongoing problem with Apple fusion drives that would be a good question. , almost 7 months because I was on vacation. So in essence I only use this second fusion drive for about 17 months now I would think an Apple product with the fusion should last more than 17 months is there a ongoing problem with Apple fusion drives that would be a good question to know , because in that case, it would be an apple product and should not be passed on to customers. I am going to pay another $390 to have this fusion repaired but I know that I need to upgrade to the Apple Silicon and I will have to buy another iMac 24 eventually took us. Apple Silicon is much better than the Intel processor but is a shame that the second fusion crapped out so soon. I back up the iMac to two external Seagate hard drives every week. I hope that I can do a time machine restore on the fusion Drive when it is returned to me.

It is unusual, but not unheard. Usually something will either fail almost immediately after beginning to use it, or it will likely last for years before a problem occurs. It is unfortunate you were unable to use the computer after the repair due to the vacation, otherwise Apple would have replaced the drive for free under its 90 day part warranty.

You can purchase an external USB3 SSD which supports UASP so that you can install macOS onto the external SSD & boot & use the iMac this way. Performance should be about the same, perhaps slightly slower since the SSD part of the Fusion Drive does utilize a faster NVMe based SSD although the hard drive part of the Fusion Drive would limit the benefit of that faster internal SSD under many workloads. At least once you decide to no longer use this iMac, then you can repurpose the external SSD for use with your newer computer (or other computers).