Replacing Fusion Drive with one SSD

Hi all,

I did have a search through for an answer to my question but couldn’t quite nail it down, so here goes.

Our old office iMac (2.9 GHz Core i5 (I5-3470S)) had a hard drive failure. We took it to the local Apple Store where a genius told us the Hard Drive had failed due to an electrical malfunction and probably had made some of the data irretrievable.

My boss, in his wisdom, decided to buy a new iMac and then sent the old HDD to a local data recovery company to see if they could retrieve any data. It had backed up to Time Machine no more than a couple of weeks ago, but for some reason (Time Machine capacity maybe??) hadn’t been backed up bang up to date

This retrieval company told him that they also needed the small blade SSD that was attached to the motherboard (we had no idea it even existed) to recover specific files … this is a section from their email:

”I have recovered all of the RAW data from the damaged drive, but I’m having trouble accessing the main data volume. Upon closer inspection, it looks like this volume is part of a ‘Fusion Drive’ and I will unfortunately need the SSD part of the drive to fully recover the data, and hopefully, this is still in the old Mac you still have.”

So… I was charged with recovering this SSD and using your fine tutorial I was able to do so. This was subsequently taken to the Data Recovery people and all data was recovered. Golden!

What the boss would now like to do is see if we can get the iMac back up and running so it can be used in an admin role within the company… so what I would like to know is:

Can I replace the combined SSD and HDD Fusion Drive with just one 2.5” SSD? Or do I need to replace both elements? If that is the case, how do I format them as a Fusion Drive so it performs the same way as before? Or do they show as 2 separate drives when I do an OS X install and the system install takes care of the Fusion bit?

If I can install just one 2,5” SSD to replace both of them, do i still need to pop the Blade SSD back into the mother board, to complete a ‘circuit’ so to speak… or is that not necessary?

Any other info wold be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Andy