SSD drives not mounting

I was greeted yesterday morning with my relatively new 4T SanDisk (Mac) not showing up as mounted, and, my bad, without a full backup of the disc. The company I purchased it from 5 months ago (B&H) said this is a common complaint of late. I’m in touch with the manufacturer but have heard nothing back yet. Fortunately it did mount this morning (running disc utility may have helped?) and I am in the process of backing it up fully right now. Just wondering if others have had similar problems, what your solutions might be and recommendations for another brand of SSD that works better.

Not really helpful to your current situation, but I can say that I’ve had no problems with several Samsung SSD’s, I’m currently using an 8TB and it’s been great.

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Hi John, sorry to hear about your issues.

I’m using a Samsung T5 256 GB SSD as an external booting drive to my iMac for 4 years now - never had any issues with it, although it sits comfortably on my desk all the time.

For photo storage I’ve been using a Lacie Rugged Mini 2 TB HDD (with the old apple connector) for about 7 years now. No problems either, and this drive did some travelling with me in my backpack. It backs up automatically to the cloud, so I don’t have to worry about it giving up finally.

Thanks. I have a 4T Samsung SSD on order!

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I purchased a Samsung 1TB drive last year when building a new desk top computer. It showed up initially but then I could not access it. Finally determined it was faulty and got a replacement that so far has worked perfectly.

I am a retired IT worker. All technology companies suffer from a small amount of failure in their products, so it may be unfair to damn a whole line of product due to one personal occurrence. I have used SanDisk for 2 decades without a failure. That was out of about 30 cards of differing sizes.

Samsung would be my second choice, based on reputation, but at the moment I would hold off on purchasing their 990 SSD due to early failure rates, per Ars Technica. You could go with an older model.

Sorry to hear this, John. You might try swapping out the cable. I’ve read that the cables tend to have problems sooner than hard drives…Best of luck.

Hope this isn’t off topic because I use Windows 10. I have problems with Windows not mounting external drives such as my Western Digital (WD) drives. I discovered that Windows, for reason that I cannot find answer for, wants to mount drives to “D” drive letter even if the drive has been named. Apparently, somewhere down the line Windows reserved the “D” letter for optical drives, which my laptop (and most others these days) does not have. But, Windows insist on assigning any attached drive to letter “D”. To keep this short, what I typically have to do is open Drive Management and reassign the drive to a letter any letter other than “D”. That immediately solves the problem. Since I don’t use a Mac I don’t know how Apple manages its external drives. But I hope this information has been of some small help.
Good luck
P.S. I don’t have the issue with my Samsung 2TB SSD mini drive.

Thank you, @GEGJr , it seems to be behaving now.