‘Buy a new one’ would be my instinct, but perhaps I can add to Adam’s update/caveat experience, having happily used a LaCie rugged 4Tb Thunderbolt 2 drive happily for the last 4/5 years on a 2015 iMac.
But I have recently sourced a nearly new 2019 27" iMac and thought I would use the old LaCie drive with the (overpriced) Apple Thunderbolt adapter. Just for media storage, not as a start up disk.
I expected the more advanced Thunderbolt 3 to happily supply power to the drive (as Thunderbolt 2) had, but no, that doesn’t work - and is documented widely I now find.
Luckily that drive also has a USB 3.1 port and a dedicated power adapter, and that works fine, when the drive is separately powered.
As a test I left the drive on its power supply, disconnected the USB and reconnected the Thunderbolt adapter, expecting that to work, but that also doesn’t show on the desktop.
So, this feels like a step backwards from Thunderbolt to USB and now needing two wires instead of one. And what use is the Apple adapter if not in this situation?
The only bright side is that the USB 3.1 speed is no slower than Thunderbolt 2 with this drive. I suspect the slowest element is the drive itself. Not a great experience however.
Wait, so you’re saying that a Thunderbolt 2 drive using the Thunderbolt 3 adapter simply won’t mount on your new iMac, even when it has power? (I knew about the problem with bus-powered devices too.) I agree, what’s the point of the Thunderbolt 2-to-3 adapter then? Perhaps it’s just a limitation of that drive, but still. I’d contact LaCie and see what they have to say for themselves.
The Apple USB-C Thunderbolt 3 male to Thunderbolt 2 female adapter has worked successfully connecting to and from OWC Thunderbay enclosures and even daisychaining to Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire adapters. All of these being used to connect various self-powered drive enclosures.
Environment includes MacBook Pro and Mac Mini and various OWC enclosures.
Adam this is a follow up,I took my 27in 2014 iMac to the Apple Store on Tuesday, you will recall I had planned to replace the external 500GB SSD with an internal SSD of same capacity. The genius checked out the machine and the diagnostics showed that the SSD (128GB) part of my Fusion Drive was fine but the HDD was toast. We agreed they would replace the HDD and reformat the Fusion Drive, instal Catalina, client the windscreen etc. During the inspection prior to signing up it was noted that there was a chip in the glass screen on the right hand side, the genius photographed this and commented that there was a chance the screen could crack whilst removing it and this would be a very high ticket item in the region of US$500, I took a deep breath and said I would take the risk.
Last night at 9.30 I go a call from the Apple Store informing me that the screen had indeed cracked during removal and would have to be replaced but as a special concession they would replace it free of charge! As a user of 35 years and a shareholder of 20 years it never ceases to amaze me how this great company can surprise and reward. It made my day and I hope to pick up the Mac today.
I’ve bought Crucial SSDs and RAM because Crucial is an American company. The drive has been zippy and reliable, better, I think, than my OWC drives. I also bought DriveDx for a mere $19. Can’t hurt.
It’s a 2014 iMac, I presume you bought it in 2014… so its a 6 year old computer. Stop messing about and replace it (whether that me another iMac or other). I’m not a big fan of throwing money at aging hardware. The money you spend on your 2014 iMac will affect decisions moving forward, like the use of TB3 (or higher) and that just ties you to the past. I don’t know what your upgrade cycle would have been without the failure but it’s knocking on the “vintage” door. Where’s the real plus to throwing more money at it?
Not buying a new iMac at the end of the current model’s cycle. It has been 440 days since the last update. Given how long I hold onto Macs, I’d prefer not to start well over a year behind the curve.
Starting off with 10.16.0 wouldn’t be my ideal situation either! It’s June already and no beta has popped up. Exactly what do you think the quality of a supposed October release is going to be??
Personally I have a 2-3 year cycle where I replace my laptop, then desktop, then laptop, in order to obviate this completely. And there’s a benefit to it running Mojave rather than being stuck with an OS you may not want to use.
At the moment, macOS version is unrelated to when the next iMac revision might come out, so I’m not considering that as a factor. Plus, I always install and run macOS betas on at least one Mac, so I’m not particularly concerned if 10.16 comes out and is required on a subsequently released iMac.
The SSD in my iMac12,2 still is fine so far, it recently passed SoftRaid’s certification. I bought a Transcend 1TB Storejet (TS1TSJM500) Thunderbolt SSD as backup and cloned the internal SSD to it. Booting and use from the Transcend are not noticeably slower than from the internal. The Transcend is bus-powered.
I’ve finally done the upgrade I wrote about earlier on my 2017 21.5 inch iMac (still running Mojave), logically disconnecting the Fusion drive after updating my SD clone, then using the kit and components from OWC to replace the 28 GB PCI bus Apple SSD with OWC’s NVMe 1 TB stick and upgrading the RAM from 8 to 32 GB. A few observations:
I agree about the room reserved down below for Jony Ive. It’s possible there’s a logical reason the RAM slots and PCI bus slot are positioned on the back of the logic board so that reaching them requires removing EVERYTHING inside the case other than the attachment points for the stand, but I’m suspicious that the REAL reason is to intimidate users from attempting this kind of repair
I would add one item to the toolkit needed to do the repair (a good pair of illuminated magnifying glasses). The microphone connector to the logic board was RIDICULOUSLY tiny. I couldn’t get it to plug back in; when I asked my son to try, he discovered that the equally tiny latch on the receptacle had flipped into the closed position!
That said, it was tedious but almost enjoyable to discover how everything was laid out inside the case, and the machine is WAY faster than it was before. My glass is still held in place by blue painter’s tape. I may actually leave it that way, even though I have OWC’s adhesive strips all ready to go.
One other caveat. When I was all done, I didn’t understand how to populate the new internal SSD from my SuperDuper clone. I blame that a bit on the SD User Guide, which is a bit dated (it still recommends a FW800 external drive as the ideal home for a clone). The User Guide spends more time recommending ways to use Disk Utility to insert the clone’s contents onto an internal startup volume (which I could not get to work) than it does what Mr. Nanian I guess thinks is intuitively obvious: just run SD “backwards” (copy the clone from the external bootable backup into the newly formatted macOS “container” on the SSD device). That took about 3 hours but worked flawlessly.
But, DAMN, that microphone connector is small.
After I was done, I looked at my grandson’s home-built Windows gaming machine, which he runs with the generic CPU case door removed. The inside of that case looks like the engine bay of a 1960s Chevy, because there’s SO much room in there.
As I said long ago and far away, if you replace the adhesive I would still tape the display on with blue tape for a week or so to let the adhesive set. As you might recall, after I removed the painter tape, I replaced it with a little bit of black tape for another week so that I could see if the adhesive was failing (it didn’t). That’s probably overkill, but I felt as though I had very much dodged a bullet when the display fell off and traumatically disconnected the cables. I wasn’t willing to take even a small risk of display or cable damage again.
I had the kernel panic issue oon my 27in iMac I replaced the iMac cleaned it and passed to my wife, no problems. New Mac misbehaved immediately first panic after 7 days and every 3 or so days thereafter, I installed Big Sur on release that was 14 days ago and I have had not a single kernel panic.
I have been in your situation, as mine went last summer and I am retired with a fixed income (and not able to get work). I thought now I waas good for at least 2-3 years before I might have to replace it again. Then, a few months ago my 1 year old SSD has sign of going south again! The last time I replaced my SSD it cost me around $600 US 3TB) and if it goes I am not sure what I will do. $600 is not cheap on my budget. I do not want to go over to the dark side but I just cannot afford this every year or so. Yes it is a pleasure to work on MACS, but IMO the SSD is/was not ready for prime time. I am also starting to loose my faith in Apple because of software and hardware issues. I used to be one of those people who who was able to find every software bug that a person could find. I don’t do exotic things, I just tend to use frequently, portions of software that seem to have a lot of bugs. Again this with OS X in OS9 days, it seemed solid as a rock,
Sorry to hear it! SSDs are a pretty time-tested technology at this point, and if anything, are more reliable than hard drives. But, of course, if you’re just terribly unlucky, you could end up with two separate SSD failures.
I’ve had very good experiences with Apple’s built-in SSDs (a few laptops, a Mac mini and many phones/iPods). But I’ve had less luck with aftermarket SSDs.
A few years ago, I upgraded my daughter’s 2011 Mac Book Air with a larger SSD (512 GB, up from Apple’s 128 GB) from OWC. It installed and worked great, but it suffered from overheating problems. During heavy use, it would suddenly go off-line crashing the system and showing a blinking question mark icon after restart. Booting an external drive would show the drive as a bare SSD controller chip, not a working drive. After turning the computer off for an hour or two (letting it cool down), it would work fine again.
OWC replaced it under warranty, but the replacement failed in the exact same way. After putting the Apple SSD back, there were no problems even under the heaviest loads.
OWC’s SSD had a thermal pad attached to it, which I did not remove (the instructions were very clear about that), but it was clearly not enough to ensure reliable operation.
Of course, the question became moot when we later upgraded the computer (for unrelated reasons), thanks to Apple soldering down the flash chips.