Chosen Solution
I have recently bought an OWC Aura Pro X2 1TB SSD for my mid 2014 MacBook Pro with the i5 intel processor. I am currently running macOS Big Sur version 11.7.1. I switched out my 128 GB apple SSD and put the OWC SSD in and held down the OPTION + COMMAND + R keys to put the computer in recovery mode. When I do that it goes to the recovery screen and I have 4 options. When I go to disk utility, I do not see the new SSD listed as an option. Even when I click view and show all devices. I went in to terminal and typed in diskutil list, and I didn’t see it show up there either. I have repeated this process probably 5-10 times now. I have put the original apple SSD back in multiple times and it works perfectly fine. I have looked through many different forums and questions and everyone seems to resolve their problem by doing what I did, but I can’t seem to find a solution. On all of the installs I have seen, the SSD should show up in the disk utilities or in terminal and not just be invisible Is the OWC SSD that I bought defective or am I doing something wrong? If these SSDs are already having problems I don’t know if I even want to bother wasting my time installing it. Hopefully someone can help as I am completely stuck and contemplating just sending it back for a refund.
Yep, a common issue! The macOS version recovery offers is Sierra or older. Apple didn’t fix the version tag so after you upgraded the Apple server doesn’t download Big Sur. You’ll need to create a bootable external drive using your current Big Sur drive. Or use an OWC Evoy case to hold you drive so you can boot up from it. Make sure the boot drive is Mojave or newer so it can both have the needed driver and allow you to format the drive as APFS Vs the older HFS+ file system.
