Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac’s Dead SSD (opens in new tab)

I got a 2016 iMac for free, and I have many times questioned if it wasn't an insult after all. It has given me nothing but grief. Had I not been able to fix things myself, I probably would have spent more money of this free iMac than I would if I had bought a decently specced computer to replace it with.

And now I have to deal with Catalina. Either it's a lemon, or there's something deeply masochistic about apple users. I have fixed enough inane issues with friends' macbooks to suspect the latter (these include: 2x broken SATA cables, 2 shitty solder jobs (of which one was "fixed" by Apple by pressing the chip down with a rubber pad against the chassi. It broke again), several things that just magically disconnected themselves inside an unopened laptop (with apple quoting several thousand SEK repair costs). All of this while providing arguably the worst repair experience of all time (the only real competition I have met is the previous gen MS surface). Yet the people I have helped still praise apple's superior quality.

That's exactly my thought. Hard drives and ram (and frankly batteries where applicable) should be externally accessible for service and replacement. Apple's eco-talk is bullshit until their repairability scores are on average a bit better than 1 or 2 out of 10.

Examples: https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability

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.

>> I have a friend with a 2011 27" iMac that uses thunderbolt 1. It has an absurdly slow HDD.

Almost every single one of those that we bought, had a hard drive failure. They used WD Green drives. I replaced them with WD Blacks, and if SSD's had been cheaper in 2012/13 we would have used them, but these were graphics designers.

You will need to control the fans with software like SMC Fan Control, which is annoying, or better yet, this harness: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIDIMACHDD11/

You can pop the glass off an iMac with a credit card (or your fingernails, they don't glue them on that year, instead they used magnets) and with a torx bit you can tilt the screen out of the way and pull the bad drive out.

I've upgraded that particular model. You can use something like this to replace the internal disk: 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

because like most systems you tend to only hear the horror stories but the vast majority never experience an issue. I replaced my previous 2013 iMac only because updates to its Nvidia video card were no longer occurring.

I have only owned iMacs since they switched to Intel, starting with a 24 inch to having passed through to my third 27 model. I never once had an issue other than software related.

Now I do agree with many that have stated that Apple should long go have ditched spinning hard drives and I am still amazed they did not. I would like to see some hard evidence of failure rates, I doubt it could be as bad as many think it is but considering how long Apple recently allowed their keyboard issues to manifest I could be wrong

Just stick the SSD to the aluminum enclosure with double sided tape. Works like a charm.

My 9yr old hard drive on my daily driver PC, still works fine.

I find this article shocking in it's relentless dropping of brand names and painstaking effort to try each and every wrong solution to every sysadmin problem.

When I see how many people complain about their macs, it reminds me of the oldsters complaining about problems with their Buicks and Chevys long ago. After WWII there were large parts of the population such as veterans, Italians, Polish, and Jewish people who would not buy a Japanese or German car. These people let the quality of American cars deteriorate dangerously because they'd buy any bucket of bolts and rust that Detroit would offer. Slowly these people died off or eventually got burned so bad by a lemon they bought that by the 2008 financial crisis the last two hold outs, car rental companies and police departments, were wavering.

Detroit realized that shipping crap cars to car rental companies just meant that people who never drove American cans would be certain to drive bad ones, and decide that they never will drive American cars.

Cops in my area went so far as to road-test Hondas, but they are still stuck with getting American cars from an industry that isn't really sure if it wants to build police cars.

It is the same with the mac. There are many unhappy people who think using a different computer is like putting a hand in a toilet, so they are afraid to upgrade to better computers that are available on a competitive market.

A lot of the trouble in the software biz in the last 10 years or so is that there is a certain kind of company that buys every dev a mac, and that they live in a world that is so insular that they never meet anybody who uses a PC, although most of the end users have PCs.

Then they wonder why they can't sell any software and can only get acqui-hired.

I 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.

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!

CCC absolute lifesaver and worth the money every time

You can also use the tool called Super-duper and with Time machine you can boot from a Time machine "back-up" if I believe so.

CCC already save mine life two times!

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

I 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.

He's trying to shelter in place.

Apple has working installers for 10.10 and up linked here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208052

You 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.

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

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.

>> 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.

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.

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)