No Flash Storage? Fusion Drive

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iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display (Late 2014 & 2015)

Model A1419 / EMC 2806 / Late 2014 or Mid 2015. 3.3 or 3.5 GHz Core i5 or 4.0 GHz Core i7 (ID iMac15,1); EMC 2834 late 2015 / 3.3 or 3.5 GHz Core i5 or 4.0 GHz Core i7 (iMac17,1) All with Retina 5K displays

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Nick Power @nickpower

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Postado: 4 de fev de 2023

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No Flash Storage? Fusion Drive

I have a late 2015m iMac 27inch, 3.2Ghz i5, 24GB RAM, 5k Retina Display.
Have been getting some slow disk read errors so looking into cloning & replacing the internal drive.
This question is not about the process of replacing & i know it can be tricky.
The questions are that i was under the impression that there were 2 drives in this model from all i've seen online, a Fusion Drive & Flash Storage.
When entering "About This Mac/Storage" there is only one drive showing in the list. A 1.02TB Fusion Drive.
Should it show 2 drives. Is there Flash Storage in this model. Would this mean that i can simply clone the Fusion Drive showing & install an SSD 2TB in place?

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Alisha C @flannelist Rep: 37,9 mil 28 42 36 · Answer 1 · 2023-02-04T06:49:08-07:00

So if your device is showing a Fusion Drive, it should only show the 1 drive, even though it is in fact 2. The Fusion Drive, is basically a specialized “RAID” type configuration. Which in essence here means the OS sees it as one drive even though it is fact two. At least in the About this Mac menu. If you use more detailed breakdowns like the System Info app or diskutil in terminal, it may reveal the truth of the matter–there are two drives in your iMac.

I have not ever had to clone a disk proper when it comes to fusion drives. But I can’t imagine it wouldn’t work. Really the Flash storage is intended as a cache drive and nothing more. Depending on the exact stuff you’re trying to preserve, doing a Time Machine backup and then restoring the back up to the macOS install on the new drive may serve your purpose. It leaves the vast majority of things intact and you don’t need any additional software since Time Machine, and Migration assistant are built into macOS.

The only thing I will mention here, is that you’ll want to be sure to reformat the flash storage as part of the upgrade. You may even want to make that the drive your OS lives on and use the 2 TB as a data only drive, depending on the size of the drive that’s there. That will throw a wrench in the cloning idea, but it’s food for thought.

@flannelist - I wouldn’t use RAID as an example let’s just call it what it is a caching drive. While a RAID drive won’t show the discrete drives they are all file system space in some form.

A Fusion Drive SSD is not a file system it’s a special DataBase system storing data blocks, it’s not even accessible via the user space. — Dan

Dan @danj Rep: 489,4 mil Self employed contract worker 35 338 973 · Answer 2 · 2023-02-04T07:34:25-07:00

Dan @danj

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Postado: 4 de fev de 2023

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The OS only shows the flat storage space not the caching SSD. So looking at the About This Mac > Storage tab won’t tell you about that magical second physical drive!

To see that you need to go into System Report button then click on NVMExpress section to see the caching SSD and to see the HDD you need to jump down to SATA/SATAExpress.

Forget Cloning! Apples file system is not like years past! It’s been well over 15 years that I’ve used a drive cloner! I only use Apples TimeMachine and Migration Assistant dealing with boot drives. I can tell you my experience is based dealing with hundreds of Mac systems with failing drives.

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iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display (Late 2014 & 2015)

No Flash Storage? Fusion Drive

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