How to get iMac to recognized SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD drive

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How to get iMac to recognized SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD drive

I was successfully using a 4TB Sandisk Extreme SSD portable drive to keep my lightroom cataloged photos (45,000). Then it stopped and the imac no longer recognized the drive. I tried another imac…nope. I tried other cables…. nope. Disk Utility does not see it.

SanDisk recommends an upgrade to its firmware. But the Mac upgrade is an exe file that has to be run inside the drive. I trieed a friends PC and it does nit recognize the drive (probably because I formatted it with APFS?

Any thoughts?

iMac 24″, macOS 13.4

Posted on Jun 13, 2023 04:49 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Rich_Dickason

Level 1

12 points

Feb 10, 2024 09:49 AM in response to Tymama

can't get my sandisk ssd 4T external drive to work on my mac

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Answer 2

Tymama

Level 1

14 points

Feb 1, 2024 07:38 PM in response to bob Keenan

The WD/SanDisk SSDs are failing - WD is getting sued for defective SSDs...

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Answer 3

Tymama

Level 1

14 points

Feb 10, 2024 01:07 PM in response to bob Keenan

WD/SanDisk is being sued by consumers for SSD failure, ejecting on its own, not being recognized etc

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Answer 4

Jun 13, 2023 06:14 PM in response to bob Keenan

I hope you have been keeping backups of the data on that drive.

With the drive in the state that it is in, I don't think that any firmware update application that has to be run from the drive is going to help you. Say that Samsung had a macOS firmware update application. How are you going to put a copy of that application onto the drive, if the drive won't mount?

(That is, without erasing the drive, and destroying all of the 45,000 Lightroom-cataloged photos that you're trying to save.)

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Answer 5

bob Keenan Author

Level 1

56 points

Jun 13, 2023 07:57 PM in response to Servant of Cats

Well…. that is the question. I have earlier Lightroom libraries and old backup of photos on old drives. So I am piecing together the library to the old folders. I have also dumped all of the masters into apple photos and they are in the cloud now. I do have timemachine but it does not back up the the drive that went bad. I also have backblaze that backed up everything but to save some money I took the bad drive off about 7 years ago.

It would all be so much easier if I could get the drive working.

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Answer 6

HWTech

Level 9

66,746 points

Jun 14, 2023 07:06 PM in response to bob Keenan

The file system being used on the drive should be irrelevant for updating its firmware especially since the whole reason the drive needs the firmware update is because it is not working properly.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds-keep-abruptly-failing-firmware-fix-for-only-some-promised/

Is that Windows PC running third party anti-virus software, or possibly third party security software which may be interfering with the normal operation of Windows?

Make sure to connect the SanDisk drive directly to the computer and disconnect all other external devices in case one of them is interfering.

FYI, see this WD article which answers a couple of your questions:

https://support-en.wd.com/app/firmwareupdate

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Answer 7

ku4hx

Level 7

23,640 points

Jun 14, 2023 07:18 AM in response to bob Keenan

That's why comprehensive backups are so important.

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How to get iMac to recognized SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD drive

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