The iMac hard drive problem
For years Apple fitted many iMacs with slow 5400rpm hard drives, sealed behind the glass. They fail often. The warning signs are a Mac that gets slower and slower, a spinning beach ball, then a grey screen or a folder with a question mark at startup.
If your iMac sounds like it's clicking or grinding, switch it off. Each restart can scratch the disk surface further.
Fusion Drives
A Fusion Drive is a small SSD and a hard drive joined so macOS sees them as one disk. Your files are spread across both. If either half fails, the whole disk disappears. We image both parts separately and rebuild the Fusion volume before recovering your files, which ordinary recovery software can't do.
Which desktop Mac do you have?
Drive can come out: we image it directlyStorage tied to the board: we repair the Mac first
- iMac up to 2019Hard drive, SSD or Fusion Drive inside. We open the iMac, remove the drives and image them.
- iMac Pro (2017) and 27-inch iMac (2020)Storage on the logic board, encrypted by the T2 chip. We repair the iMac to reach it.
- iMac with Apple silicon (2021 onward)Soldered storage encrypted by the M-series chip. Board-level recovery.
- Mac mini up to 2014Hard drive, SSD or Fusion Drive. Removed and imaged directly.
- Mac mini 2018 onwardSoldered storage, encrypted by the T2 or Apple chip.
- Mac Pro up to 2019 (Intel)Removable drives or SSDs. The 2019 model's SSD modules only unlock in the original Mac Pro, so bring the whole machine.
Mac Pro, Mac Studio and office Macs
If a Mac holds work your business can't be without, call us first. We'll talk you through what to bring and can prioritise the job. We also recover RAID sets from Mac Pro workstations and external RAID enclosures.