Chosen Solution
My iMac died (logic board and screen and I’m not interested in paying Apple $1000 in repairs) for a 5-year old machine. I have one (large) folder that’s not backed up properly and I would like to get my data off it. The trick is it’s on a filevault encrypted fusion drive. I know the easiest ways to get the data (replacing the logic board for $350 and booting into target disk mode, or replacing the screen as well for another $180). I want a cheaper, viable alternative so I can spend the rest on a new machine. (Plus, Apple didn’t exactly do a full diagnostic so there could be other parts in need of repair, including the power supply.) I’ve read that the ssd blade is just a cache, but the HDD can’t be read without it. One post suggested that if I put both blade and hdd in enclosures, a mac would automatically treat them as 1. Another indicated that I could hook up the HDD and use 3rd party software to read it, but it didn’t seem to have a lot of support and wasn’t addressing filevault. I am trying to avoid spending $100 on an external enclosure for the blade which I’ll only use once, but if that’s what it takes…
The SSD and HDD are inseparable, in that the bits are spread across both devices, so it isn’t just a simple cache. Therefore, running data recovery on the hard drive alone won’t recover all of your data. You’ll need to attach both the SSD and HDD to another computer to read the data. The good news is, yes they should just appear as a fusion drive when you attach both old drives! Just make sure you know the FileVault recovery key. If you’re only going to use the enclosure once… I would probably just buy one from some place with a good return policy.
