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My grandmother’s 2015 27” iMac just recently had its motherboard fail, and she wanted to get all of her data backed up off of it without paying for a new motherboard. Normally this would be very easy to do as all you need to do is pull of the screen and disconnect the hard drive, but when she purchased the machine, she got it with an Apple Fusion Drive instead of a regular HDD or SSD. My question is if there is any way to retrieve the data from the Fusion Drive myself without replacing the iMac’s motherboard and coping the data over to a different disk. As far as I know, there isn’t a very easy way to do this. Any suggestions on what to do?
There is no such thing as a Fusion Drive device! A fusion drive is two physical devices interconnected into a logical device (SATA HDD and the PCIe SSD) The SSD is nothing more than a cache drive to the HDD. Holding duplicate data from the HDD as the SSD retrieval is faster! So if the logic board failed your HDD still has all of the data on your HDD. Removing the drive placing it into a case will allow you to retrieve your grand mothers data. iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display Hard Drive Replacement Just be aware an encrypted drive will require the saved key otherwise it’s not possible to recover the data.
