Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac’s Dead SSD | Hacker News Reader

Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac’s Dead SSD

tidbits.com

62 pointsyhoiseth68 comments

Lesson #7: Don't buy an iMac

Seriously. Why would you ever buy a computer that you need to remove the screen from to replace a part like an HDD with a high failure rate?

I have a friend with a 2011 27" iMac that uses thunderbolt 1. It has an absurdly slow HDD. I was going to try to help her upgrade it, but I can't find a TB1 enclosure to put an SSD into. The other choice is FW800, and those are incredibly rare too.

I'm actually shopping for these as we speak, so reading this article was very timely..

EDIT: Finally found a FW800 SATA 2.5" enclosure on Amazon that I can pop an SSD into. Sadly it was more expensive than a cheap SSD.

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.

Question:what was bad about the surface repair experience? I'm curious, as I've been fairly pleased with mine over the last 6 months but I haven't looked into the repairability of it. I'd read that MS were pretty good on warranty claims, but should I be concerned? For reference, the keyboard has been run over by a forklift once already (don't ask), but I've been fairly impressed so far.

I know this won't be as easy to work on as my old thinkpads, but should I be concerned about warranty repairs? If so, I might want to consider a cheap chromebook solely to use in my warehouse.

The one I opened was made up mostly of glue and solder with some components in between. It was a Surface Laptop. iFixit are way better at describing the pains of trying to open it up: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Laptop+Tea...

They give the newer (2019) variants a far better score, so Microsoft are at least on a good path there.

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

Apple's eco-talk is bullshit

Apple's hypocrisy is overwhelming.

Don't forget that Al Gore, who Wikipedia calls an "environmentalist" in the very first sentence, has been on their Board of Directors for many years.[1] Twenty eight years ago he wrote the book Earth in the Balance to warn us about ecological problems.

He's taken millions of dollars from Apple, and together they've done jack-shit about repairability. There is some argument to be made for lower repairability in laptops, but WTF is their excuse for iMac desktops???

They're all Gulfsteam environmentalists, jetting off to places like Davos where they can cavort with others of their ilk while lecturing the rest of us on how bad things are.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_gore

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.

Presumably the repair shop will charge more if the job on the iMac takes 5 times as long and risks damaging the screen.

The drive isn't even broken. Its just a painfully slow 5400rpm spinning rust drive that makes the machine sluggish.

>> 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.

Yeah, you need some suction cups to do it easily, but drive swaps on iMacs are trivial. If you prepare. Get the tools for $5 and go for it.

Rather than buying suction cups (for which I would subsequently have had no further use), I managed very nicely by using just a couple of strips of packing tape. Each strip formed a "handle" -- one on each side of the screen, same as you'd do with the suction cups.

There are various ways to manage this, I suppose, but in my case each strip began as a roughly 16 inch length. I folded it 180 degrees at the halfway point and allowed the two legs to stick to each other for about 4 inches. Then the two legs part company, turning 90 degrees but in opposite directions -- and that 90 degree point is where the tape meets the surface of the glass.

This works, but it is risky since I've seen it damage the screen coatings on some of the iMacs. Some of the older ones seemed to have softer coatings.

Why did you buy an iMac for graphic designers? (No sarcasm or hate)

When you are doing heavy lifting, the iMac isn't that good enough?

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

I'm not going to try to remove the screen, I'm sorry.

I don't mind turning screws, but I'm not going to mess with glass and glue and stuff. I'm clumsy and afraid I'll break something just by looking at it wrong. Especially on something that isn't mine.

There's no glue - it's held on by magnets. Honestly, it's really easy! Just check here: https://youtu.be/pU2JT6NGNOQ?t=11

With newer models, Apple has replaced the magnets with glue.

Screws are much more delicate than glass. Screws strip very easily, making it impossible to remove the connection.

Philips heads strip unusually easily because the driver will fit, but then cam out damaging the drive, if you use the wrong driver size or too little pressure. Or if it's actually a JIS or Pozidriv, and you're using a Philips driver because you don't know better, or the proper sets are expensive, or the size and type you need is in the same place all your 10mm sockets are.

Most other drives don't have most of these problems. Even with the infamous Pentalobe, as long as you get the size right, it's pretty hard to screw up.

Philips heads camming out is a feature in certain contexts, apparently.

So I gather, and after all it is by design, but after a lifetime of dealing with the miserable things I've come to regard the design as either obsolete or just bad from the start.

edit: Apocryphally by design, anyway. Wikipedia says that's an urban legend, unfounded. I cordially despise the things either way, and I'm sure the sentiment is reciprocated.

They are bad by design. You can just limit the torque on your cordless drill.

It’s not glue - the glass is actually held on by magnets around the perimeter. At least my iMac was...

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

In this case, the reason for replacement is the fact that its a slow spinning disk and makes the system feel sluggish and dated, not that it has failed.

What I find shameful is that in 2020 Apple is STILL SELLING 5400rpm spinnng drives as the base drive in iMacs. https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/

I still own and use my 2007 iMac as an iTunes server for the Apple TV. I changed the drive around 2010 because it failed, but outside of that I had nothing but a magnificent experience. I love my iMac.

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 resurrected my old Macbook Air 2013 last weekend with a replacement SSD (the last one failed totally with nearly no warning). In the meantime I had some longer Ubuntu laptop time as a short term replacement.

Kudos to the software Carbon Copy Cloner. Everything is as before and lost only 4 weeks of data because of an old image (but that's okay, not super important).

Lessons learned:

- Test your backup strategy and your backups !!

- External APFS or HFS drives cannot be read by Linux (especially if encrypted with FileVault). Maybe I will switch to Veracrypt + NTFS (or FAT32) for external drives in the long-run.

- Restoring in recovery mode from a sparseimage did not worked out. A real 1:1 copy on an external drive is better and immediately bootable.

- Installing macOS Mojave on a bigger USB stick is slooow (3 hours?), the same goes for booting, but it seemed the only option for me to use Carbon Copy Cloner to restore to the internal ssd.

- Do more regular backups

- Maybe monitoring the internal SSDs health in future? The software drivedx looks interesting.

- side note on Linux: pinch and zoom gesture on trackpads is totally non existent on Linux desktop (even Windows is better with this). There are not even interfaces for it as far as I've seen.

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.

The 2015 Macbook Pro? As in, it has Magsafe and Thunderbolt 2? You can indeed remove and replace the SSD, all you need is one of these adapters and then you can put in any M.2 NVMe you want. I'm using an Intel 660p in my '15 MBP, I can answer any questions you have about the upgrade process.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2016-201...

My apologies. That was meant to be 2016 when touchbar was released.

I had the previous gen with removable SSD and did use a caddy for that when it’s logic board died.

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!

Why specify aluminium? For example, Magnesium alloy is 30% lighter and less prone to warps and dents. For Linux, I would consider a ThinkPad (T or X series) or a Dell XPS developer edition.

Aluminium was my lazy way of saying non-plastic. I’d rather it dint than crack.

Thanks for the tips.

Razer Blade Stealth 13" 2020 or the newest Dell XPS 13" (but that is not aluminium).

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!

That was concerning, so I finished what I was doing, restarted in macOS Recovery by rebooting while holding down Command-R, launched Disk Utility, started First Aid, went to make dinner, and promptly forgot about it.

One thing I've learned over the years is that if you suspect a hardware failure, especially to the boot drive, there's a very good chance that a reboot is not going to succeed. As the article shows, the "true end" came not long after that. Good that he has backups, and that's probably why he could even forget about it.

The drive supposedly has 128 MB of cache memory, but it’s only 5400 rpm, and while its speed has never been a noticeable problem while making backups, it’s painful beyond belief to use as a boot drive. USB 3.0 might theoretically be capable of 625 MBps, but when I tested the drive in Blackmagic Speed Test, it averaged just 20–25 MBps for both read and write speeds.

Maybe SSDs have spoiled us, but I'm still surprised just how much disk activity newer OSes produce, especially upon boot; or perhaps it's just the non-default stuff loaded upon startup by apps, which can easily build up without affecting performance if you normally have an ultra-fast SSD. I know someone who used a regular USB flash drive (probably <10MB/s) with a "portable" copy of XP for several years as a basic minimal development environment, and it wasn't actually slower than a HDD of the time; in fact, it was quite responsive, probably due to the much better random read performance of flash vs. a spinning disk.

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.

Mojave isn't searchable in the Mac App Store, but direct links work: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-mojave/id1398502828?ls...

I'd download that to another computer and make a bootable usb drive.

Can't wait to see glued thin M.2 SSD envelopes at the bottom/back of MacBook Pros with U-shaped USB-C connectors in one of the ports once the recent models' SSDs start failing...

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.

Here's hoping, though I had a colleague recently have his retail boot SSD burnout after thrashing it during some development on automated testing. It happens, and if it does, owners are fucked. Big bet imo

> I had a copy of the Mojave installer available, but when I booted using the MacBook Air in Target Disk Mode, it was running Catalina, and wouldn’t let me install Mojave because it was too old.

The whole Apple "We won't let you install old OS's" and "Good luck finding an old OS install image. Ha! Ha!" infuriates me.

I don't want to have to go trawling through Warez sites just to find a version of OS X compatible with a 5 year old computer.

Apple has working installers for 10.10 and up linked here:

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

It's kind of annoying that the OS X Mountain Lion update that I paid for is no longer available from the App Store…

From the App Store app on a 10.13 machine, all of the 10.7-10.11 updates show up in Purchased for me

You have the old App Store. The new one doesn't show it…

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.

So, I normally don't use AIO desktop, which in general use soldered RAM/ disks in these days. Yes, you can get extra space on your desk but the handling of the errors are quite bothersome. For laptop, someone may use laptop as a main system, but for me it is substitute, so I don't bother whether it fails or not, and fortunately, I didn't see the failure on my rMBP, XPS, or even chromebook yet.

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)

>> I ordered it directly from Samsung to avoid Amazon shipping delays and got it two days later.

Do people no longer go to Best Buy, Staples, Micro Center...?

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

Best Buy will bring your purchases out to your car...

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.

Micro Center has always seemed decent to me. True, they have a few annoyances: their staff seems to work on commission which probably sucks for them, and they always try to get my personal info for marketing when I check out, but it's still the closest thing to a Newegg catalog in brick-and-mortar form.

I actually didn't notice Micro Center in the list. Haven't been there myself, so really speak to the experience.

He's trying to shelter in place.

I use a Transcend JetDrive 855 with a 2015 iMac 5K. It's expensive, but does the job and is very fast (Thunderbolt 10 Gb/s and internally M.2 PCIe).

Reasons to never restore from backup. Keep your data in the cloud and reinstall OS’s from scratch.

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

You can use https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html and have them ship you a HDD with your data in case of failure. If you're OK with not encrypting your backup...

Sounds like the data is stored only on the cloud. I would have trouble working that way. You'd also want to make a backup somewhere else, in case the cloud provider loses it.

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