I am looking at buying a used iMac, and the person selling it is showing that the fusion drive with a separate SSD and HD. I thought they should be combined?
Should I be concerned?
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You can combine them. Maybe one of the drives have been replaced or purposely split out to their separate components (Fusion drive is not a single drive). You should ask why they are separate. Personally, I would replace the spinning component with SSD or get a bigger SSD component (if possible).
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Here’s the reason given: “I honestly don’t know why they do that either. I’ve seen both. Sometimes they are combined and listed as a 1.02 TB. Sometimes they are separated like this one. When we go to the disk utility to erase previous owners info, that’s just how they were. So we leave them as they were.”
And I would prefer not to open an iMac and put in an SSD. Very difficult to do with the screen pasted to the body. I plan though to connect an SSD via UBS-C and run off of that.
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Okay, so it sounds like this seller got the Mac from someone else and reselling on. I’d say if everything works then it’s no problem. You can recombine the drives if you want to. Remember the SSD is just acting as a large cache.
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The screen is not pasted to the body. @Leo often talks about his adventures with suction cups and iMac.
Visit ifixit.com for instructions. I literally removed the glass screen with one suction cup from a windshield GPS mount. Two work better. Once you get the glass off, it’s no worse than working on a laptop.
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I’m not following. How do you think the screen is attached to the body? Take a look at this guy taking off the screen to replace the HD with an SSD. He talks about how they changed the iMac from magnets to adhesive…
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In addition, way too easy to cut the wires around the glass and there’s a risk of electric shock…
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Sorry, guess I assumed a different model iMac. When I removed the HD from a dead 27” iMac, only needed suction cups and Torx drivers.
If you have a solution that avoids taking it apart that you are happy with, that’s great.
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Yes, I think those were the more “boxier” pre-2012 types.