When the hard-disk half of a Fusion Drive fails, the combined volume breaks. Recovering it means rebuilding it from both devices.
A family’s iMac had stopped booting and an Apple store had drawn a blank. At the heart of it was a Fusion Drive — Apple’s trick of teaming a small, quick SSD with a roomier hard disk and showing the two to macOS as if they were one drive. Convenient, certainly, but with a hidden dependency: since files end up distributed over both units, losing either takes the combined volume down with it. In this instance the hard disk had failed mechanically. The SSD was faultless, yet on its own it amounted to only half of anything.
We recognised the arrangement as a Fusion (Core Storage) volume and established that the mechanical failure was confined to the hard disk, the SSD being healthy. That shapes the whole job, because a Fusion Drive can’t be tackled as one unit: you have to recover each of the two physical drives separately, and then rebuild the single logical volume that had been sitting on top of them both.
We started with the ailing hard disk, copying it on the DeepSpar — a careful, complete image of a drive plainly on its way out — while the PC3000 stood ready for its firmware; the healthy SSD imaged in short order. With both images secured, the Core Storage volume was reconstructed in software, drawing the scattered data back off the two copies and knitting it into one so the file system beneath could be read as a single, coherent whole.
Working from the rebuilt volume, we confirmed the family’s photos, home videos and documents all opened — the baby photos that had prompted the panic very much included — and then wrote the recovered data to fresh media.
Everything on the Fusion Drive was returned, handed back on new media six working days in. What it underlines is the flip side of the convenience: with two drives working as one, a single failure can carry off the entire volume — which makes a separate backup just as essential here as on any single disk, if not more so.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — both devices imaged separately in-house and the Core Storage volume rebuilt from the copies. Each drive is imaged before any work, and the originals are never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
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That comes down to how the storage is built. If it’s a Fusion Drive, we take out both parts — the small SSD and the hard disk that macOS treats as one — recover each on its own, and reassemble the volume. If it’s soldered flash on a T2 or Apple Silicon Mac, that’s outside what we can do.
A Mac with a removable drive is from £300 plus VAT; a Fusion Drive is £550. Storage soldered onto the logic board is something we don’t take on. Most jobs are no fix, no fee.
No, provided you can supply your account password. Encrypted volumes, FileVault included, are only ever recoverable by the person who owns the device.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.