External Crucial P310 1TB SSD M.2 Drive Failed

leetut wrote:

I wouldn’t be here if I was keeping backups, never purchased anything from iTunes Store and never will, it was all old obscure cd’s and records I gave away years ago, music doesn’t bother me it’s all on my iPhone, photos of dead relatives, important docs bother me, yes I know now I should of backed this up but I didn’t, lesson learned, now can we get back to how I recover the data, iMac sees the drive, shows it as a 1TB drive, chatGPT says there’s a program I can try or sending it to a lab, are there any other suggestions from you apple experts?

Post screenshot of Disk Utility showing the external drive. Make sure to select View > Show All Devices first. You may be able to manually mount the drive from Disk Utility. If you can, make backup immediately.

Re: “no back up, ive been copying everything from old imac to new imac over the past 2 weeks”

Do you still have the old iMac? And are the songs and photos still on it? If so, at least you could try recovering them from it.

leetut wrote:

A data recovery program called EaseUS appears to be able to scan my unmountable drive, I can see previews of all my photos, how is this possible if Mac can’t mount the drive?

Mounting a volume requires the partition map, and the filesystem, to be intact – or at least, for any corruption that the Mac detects to be within tolerable bounds.

If the data looks too corrupt, the Mac may mount a volume read-only, refuse to mount it, or not believe that there is a volume at all. I would assume that something (e.g. failure of the SSD) has caused crucial data on it – no pun intended – to become this corrupt.

Just as a guess – the EaseUS program may be reading the drive at a lower level, as a block device, and trying to piece together bits and pieces of files, based on an assumption that a lot of filesystem structure is still there. On SSDs, this would be unlikely to recover deleted files – due to the way in which free space management and wear leveling on SSDs work. But if the problem is that something clobbered the partition map or volume header data, crawling over the rest of the blocks might still allow recovering something. (With the usual caveats that you may not recover everything, and what you do recover might be corrupted, might have filenames missing, etc.)

On the possibility that the case may have failed and not the SSD itself you could take it out of the existing case and plug it into an USB C to SATA adaptor as shown in this image:

to see if the SSD is dead or not. If not you can run it from the adaptor (have have 4 on my Mini M4). It gets 500 Mps read and write speed. Not the fastest but I can open a 170 GB Photos library on it is 1 second and a 350 Mb Photoshop image in 3 seconds.

When SSDs fail, they often do so catastrophically, with no warning and no means of tecovery.

Hopefully you were keeping backups. In the case of music purchased from the iTunes Store, you should be able to re-download any music that the artists and labels have not pulled from the store, Likewise, with music purchased on CD, you can re-import the music from CD (although that is slower than restoring files from a backup).

That's unfortunate. You can try sending it out for recovery, but I wouldn't expect to get anything useful.

I'm afraid you have learned a hard lesson on the importance of backing up digital information.

FYI: If you rip CDs, etc to your computer, then give away or sell the originals, you no longer own the music on your computer.

You're permitted to make copies of media you own for your own use, but if you no longer own the original media, your license to the copies is void.

I would not expect a USB to SATA adapter like the one shown to be very useful for connecting the OP’s M.2 NVMe “circuit board stick” SSD.

Nope, you're right. They do have USB to SATA for the NVme SSDs. I just looked them up earlier today.

Thanks for the catch.

You got "the warning"...? What warning?

What was the message you got?

What troubleshooting have you done?

If the SSD actually failed, the odds of recovering anything from it are pretty much zero.

There are apparently quite a few reports of those drives failing catastrophically.

Hope you have a backup.