How Fusion Drive Affect Data Recovery?
Fusion drive
We believe that this term is well known among Apple users. A fusion drive helps to fuse two separate drives, which are 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 the fusion drive helps 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 instead of being divided into two different partitions or parity. Likewise, if you plan to use only 1 of the drive that is configured as a fusion drive, you will not be able to see any valid data. Let's simplify the terms, if you took out either one of them, you are chopping off your internal hard drive into 2 pieces.
How does It work?
The Fusion drive system will store data into various block sizes set by the system. These blocks are moveable, and it is depending on user behavior. Data that is always accessed by the user will be moved by the system over to the NAND flash drive. Otherwise, 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 related to Fusion Drive. Most of the cases that visited us is when the iMac was unbootable and need to change the internal SSD or HDD. As the data is needed, both drives should remain and do not install any new system into these patient drives. 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 the 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 is done, it will affect the memory block and mess up the whole data structure. Reach out to the data recovery centre Singapore for advice before any action.
