External Crucial P310 1TB SSD M.2 Drive Failed

FYI, it appears you posted information about the "Macintosh HD" boot volume for your internal 250GB SSD of your M-series Mac. That is irrelevant for an external SSD issue.

As others have mentioned, most SSD failures occur suddenly & the physical drive will not be seen by the system. The fact Disk Utility sees the physical SSD tells me the SSD has probably not failed (most SSD failures are triggered at powering on/connecting the SSD & waking from sleep). If the SSD suddenly disappears why transferring large amounts of data, then it may indicate the SSD's controller is overheating & crashing (nearly impossible to recover data yourself if this is the case).

Since we have no idea what has occurred, then you need to proceed carefully since you have at least 200GB of data you want to recover. Hopefully your data recovery app is able to find the files using just a Quick scan so it can retrieve the file names & folder structures & locations. If the data recovery app requires using a Thorough or Deep Scan, then most likely you will be overwhelmed by the data recovered as well as the lack of file names & folder structures. A Thorough or Deep Scan looks at the raw storage blocks for data types the recovery app understands which is why file names & folder structures are lost.

To attempt to check the health of the external Crucial SSD, you can run the third party app DriveDx (free trial period). If the SSD is connected using USB, then you will need to install a special USB driver to attempt to allow the necessary communication to the SSD's health information....It is possible your enclosure/dock/hub/adapter won't allow the necessary communication.

Post the complete DriveDx text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. A manual interpretation of the DriveDx health report of an SSD by someone experienced with analyzing SSD health reports is needed since not all "Warnings" and "Failing" conditions are fatal for an SSD (most are not fatal, it just indicates a problem was encountered & may require resetting the SSD to resolve it). Maybe this health report will tell us whether the SSD encountered a problem or whether the issue is caused by something else. Unfortunately many NVMe SSDs only have very basic health information available....I'm not sure what this Crucial SSD may provide us.

If you are able to recover your files, it may be possible to use a Terminal command to attempt to replace the main partition table with the backup partition table. However, you don't want to modify anything on the SSD until after you have recovered the data as best as you can.

What file system was being used on the Crucial SSD?

As someone else mentioned, I'm also concerned about the SSD enclosure being used. That enclosure/hub/dock/adapter could be the source of the problem. Try connecting the SSD directly to the computer & disconnect all other external devices in case one of them is causing a problem. Also try connecting the SSD to a powered hub or dock to provide more power to the SSD as well as buffering the SSD from the Mac. You may find you may not need any data recovery software.

FYI, people need to have frequent & regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.

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.