Mac Mini and MacBook Pro not recognizing external SATA drives after migration

I have a 2019 16” MBP running 26.7.1 and a new M6 Mac Mini running 27.0.1.

I set up the Mac Mini by migrating from the MBP. For the most part, it’s been smooth sailing, but I have one problem:

I have:

Five 3.5-inch “bareback” SATA HDDs; three are 500GB, and two are 4TB.
One 2.5-inch 960GB “bareback” SanDisk SATA SDSSDH1.
All of the SATA drives are formatted with APFS - GUID Partition Map; several were configured as boot disks.
An Insignia-branded dual SATA dock connected by a USB-A to USB-C cable to one of the USB-C ports on the front of the Mini.
One of the HDDs contained an up-to-date, scheduled Time Machine backup of the MBP as of the moment I started the migration. The MBP maintained the Time Machine backup on one of the 4TB HDDs.

The Mini does not recognize any of the drives.

Did I somehow accidentally brick the HDDs and the one SSD? Is it possible that the Mini does not recognize the drives? One significant detail is that the MBP does not recognize the SATA drives any longer. As part of the migration, I updated the MBP to the latest MacOS.

Any ideas? It seems like too much of a coincidence for all of the SATA drives to die at the same time as the setup and migration from the MBP to the Mini.

Posted on Sep 30, 2026 11:41 AM

1 reply

neuroanatomist

Level 9 (72,871 points)

Sep 30, 2026 11:49 AM in response to Randal Davison

Open Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility, select View menu > Show all devices. Does it show up there, and if so, can you mount it (button in the top toolbar)?

More info: Disk Utility User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

It is incredibly unlikely that you bricked six independent drives simultaneously. Because neither the M6 Mac Mini nor your 2019 MacBook Pro can recognize the SATA drives now, possible single points of failure are the Insignia dual SATA dock, its power supply, or the USB-A to USB-C cable.

If you have 3rd party ‘protection’ software installed, that may be the problem. For example, ESET has been reported to prevent external drives and memory cards from mounting. Such 3rd party system ‘helpers’, ‘cleaners’ and ‘protectors’ do more harm than good. In fact, such products are completely unnecessary for macOS and the only ‘good’ (if you want to call it that) they do is to put money in the developers’ pockets. For the user, they offer only harm…and if that is limited to harm to your bank account, then count yourself lucky.

There were a few prior posts on this forum from users who couldn’t access their external drive due to the drive manufacturer’s software that they used to encrypt the drive. Lacie/Seagate, Samsung, SanDisk, etc., all provide 'drive management' software on their drives and using such 3rd party software can cause issues when macOS is updated and the 3rd party software becomes incompatible. Not sure if that's the issue here, but FYI the best practice with a new external drive (SSD/HDD, not applicable to NAS drives) is to use Disk Utility to complete erase it, format it as GUID/APFS and apply encryption if desired.

FWIW, I have a bunch of Samsung T7 and T9 SSDs ranging from 1 TB to 4 TB and a pair of Crucial 8 TB SSDs, and they all work fine with my M4 Pro MacBook Pro running the current version of macOS (27.0.1).