So, I got a “new” (new to me) SSD from the trash pile at work.
It was in an old crusty Intel-era iMac that’s been sitting out there for who knows how long (months to years), being exposed to the elements.
I took it out and cleaned it up as the SSD itself was dirty, surprisingly there was minimal water/dirt ingress to the interior.
A quick teardown and cleaning later, and it was time to test.
After plugging the SSD into my computer, turns out it still works perfectly (even after being rained on many times).
It is a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo, with DRAM. It was built 02/2015.
It only has ~8000 power on hours and ~10TBw, which isn’t bad for a 1TB SSD out of an iMac.
The disk appears to have been wiped, but I checked for “lost” partitions with testdisk and it turns out that there is an APFS partition on it.
I tried mounting it in Linux, but the experimental driver did not like it.
So off to make a macOS VM, I go.
and that sure was a challenge.
First I tried VirtualBox, but once I got the installer booted using some complex commands, it’d randomly kernel panic before the install even started.
Then I tried raw Qemu/KVM, but I couldn’t get OpenCore to recognize the disk image.
Then I tried the nice OSX-KVM project, and it works nicely. macOS Sonoma is currently installing into a VM on my desktop as I type this.
Now, the challenge is to see if it works or not.
It does, in fact, not work… It keeps kernel panicing during init and I can’t be bothered to try to diagnose it.
According to Linux, the drive is encrypted anyways. So I’m just going to properly wipe the drive, set it to 4KN sectors, and use it.
I’m mostly likely going to use it as either an L2ARC for my ZFS pool, or a 2nd drive to mirror DaServ’s root… because nVME IO errors are causing issues, and soon I will not be close enough to the server to physically reboot it.
To help avoid these issues, I just start mounting the root on DaServ with fatal_errors=panic so it will kernel panic and autoreboot if the root filesystem starts to throw IO errors.
The only reason I was able to remotely reboot the system last time, is because I happened to have a root SSH session already open. so I used the sysrq-trigger and reset the system.
Anyways, it was fun rescuing an SSD from a trash pile… I’m surprised it worked, and those SSDs are worth ~$180-200 USD brand new because of the current SSD prices. So that just saved me a good chunk of money.