The SSD drive will be a great choice due to its faster read-write speed, lower power consumption, etc. Now SSD drives are slowly replacing the old and traditional HDDs. Most people use internal SSDs in their computers and external SSD to back up important files. However, these aren’t without issues. One of the issues you could face while using these drives is your external SSD not showing up on Mac.
If that ever happens, you will find that your external SSD is can’t be accessed because it doesn’t seem to appear in Finder, Disk Utility, or anywhere. But not to worry. There are many solutions to this problem.
Solution 1: Verify The Hardware Connections
The first and foremost thing to do after your external SSD doesn’t show up on your Mac is to check the USB connections. In this case, the connecting cables may be loose or the USB adapter maybe be incompatible with your external SSD. So, to make sure the SSD connectivity is perfect, you can try connecting the SSD with a different cable and port to confirm that these are not issues.
Solution 2: Reboot Your Mac
Sometimes, the invisible external hard issue is caused by the system issue. But you can easily fix them by restarting them. You can choose Apple menu > Restart. The computer will shut down and come back on a few moments later.
Solution 3: Check Apple’s Disk Utility
Disk Utility is a hard disk management application that comes with macOS. When you meet any disk error, the most important step is to check whether the disk is in Disk Utility. Then you can determine whether the drive has a hardware problem or not. Hold Command+Space to open Spotlight search. In the search box, type Disk and then press Enter. Choose View > Show All Devices from the top left menu bar in Disk Utility.
- If the external SSD is listing in the left sidebar but grayed out. You can simply select the SSD and choose Mount on the top pane. Hopefully, your external SSD is recognized by Mac. However, if you fail to mount the SSD, the disk may have some file system errors and you can follow the solution 4 and 5 to repair it.
- f your external SSD doesn’t appear in the Disk Utility, that means the disk has been physically damaged and can’t be recognized by your Mac. If you are fed up with this situation, read this tutorial to fix Mac not recognizing an external SSD.
Step 3: Click Run and wait till Disk Utility repairs your corrupted external SSD.
Solution 5: Recover data and then erase the external SSD
If First Aid is unable to repair disk issues, your external SSD is seriously corrupted or formatted using a file system that the Mac cannot read. In this situation, the only way is to erase the SSD. But if you haven’t backed up precious data, I suggest you recover data from the corrupted external SSD first.
As a free data recovery software, iBoysoft Data Recovery is highly recommended here to help you. Follow the steps to recover data from the corrupted external SSD:
Step 1: Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery on your Mac for free.
Step 2: Select the corrupted external SSD and click the Scan button.
Step 3: When the scanning finishes, you can filter lost data via file types, file names, and extensions. You can also double-click to preview recoverable files.
Step 4: Choose the desired data and click the Recover button.
After successfully restoring lost data from the external SSD, you can erase the SSD without any concern.
Step 1: Launch Disk Utility from the Utility folder in your Applications.
Step 2: In the left sidebar, select the external SSD on the left pane and click Erase atop the Disk Utility window.
Step 3: Choose a new name and format for your drive, then click Erase.
Conclusion
SSD delivers superior performance and durability, but that doesn’t mean it will no longer turn corrupted. It’s a bit disappointing to see that your computer doesn’t recognize your external SSD. However, there are ways to fix the issue, as described above. I hope this article helped you make your Mac appear on the SSD.
If, for some unavoidable reason, you do end up losing your files from your external SSD; you can run iBoysoft Data Recovery and get everything back.
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