How Fusion Drive Affect Data Recovery?
Fusion drive
We believe that this term is well known among apple users. Fusion drive help to fuse two separate drives together, which is SSD and HDD. Both drives will be present as a single storage drive. Fusion drive helps to increase the drive capacity and optimize the speed of reading. This technology is improving over the years and there are many advancements.
How It Affects the Data?
While fusion drive help to improve the performance of the system, users will not be able to boot up the system if either one of the drives failed. This is because both SSD and HDD are interrelated as they are used as Core Storage. It is not a RAID system, as they are sharing the whole storage together instead of divided in two different partitions or parity. Likewise, if you plan to use only 1 of the drive that configured as fusion drive, you will not be able to see any valid data. Let simplify the terms, if you took out either one of them, you are chopping off your internal hard drive into 2 pieces.
How It Works?
The Fusion drive system will store data into various block sizes that set by the system. These blocks are moveable, and it is depending on user behavior. Data that always access by user will be moved by the system over to NAND flash drive. Otherwish, it will be moved over to the HDD. These are all recorded in a metadata file and it is varied on each device.
Will It Affect Data Recovery?
Yes. As a Singapore data recovery centre encountered many cases that related to Fusion Drive. Most of the cases that visited us is when the iMac unbootable and need to change the internal SSD or HDD. As the data needed, both drives should remain and do not install any new system into these patient drive. Firstly, our recovery specialist requires to retrieve the data from the faulty drive. Then, retrieve the metadata from these devices in other to combine all block sizes in a proper structure for data extraction. The second step is the crucial step during recovery process. Imagine if the metadata file is affected or lost due to the faulty, we need to identify the arrangement of these blocks without any reference.
Suggestion
Except with professional advice, do not attempt to access or recover the data. Any mistake done, it will affect the memory block and mess up the whole data structure. Reach out any Singapore data recovery centre for advice before any action.
