How to fix iPhone 15 Pro Max Not connecting to External SSD?

With USB-C support the iPhone 15 now let you save the data directly to external drives. But recently some iPhone users are facing issue that the new iPhone 15 Pro Max is not detecting external SSD of different make like Seagate Firecuda 2TB. The SSD does not work properly with the iPhone 15 and sometimes its works and sometimes it does not. Also there are frequent connection drops with the SSD.

Even when the SSD is formatted on Windows to ExFat but still the iPhone 15 pro max is not recognising the drive. This seems to be issue with connectivity of iPhone 15 and SSD hard drive.

Why iPhone 15 Pro Max not recognising external SSD:

If your iPhone 15 Pro mx is not recognising external SSD then this could be due two primary reasons. One is the SSD is not properly formaated to ExFat and second reason is the USB cable used is not supported by either iPhone or SSD drive, specially 2TB SSD.

How to fix iPhone 15 Pro Max not recognising external SSD

Try MacBook to format the SSD:

If you have already formatted the SSD using widows and its not working with iPhone 15 then try reformatting via a MacBook. Open MacBook disk utility and try reformatting SSD on MAC via and choose ExFat. Once done connect the SSD drive to iPhone 15 again and now it should detect the drive.

Use USB4/ 240W cable:

Some Apple forum users reported that mainly due to cable the  SSD (2TB) is not connecting with the iPhone. Apparently the thunderbolt 4 cable with 40GBPS transfer works fine with iPhone 15 and SSD as it is able to power the device properly.

If you are facing issue in connecting iPhone 15 to SSD then look for a cable which supports 40gbps transfer rate at 240W.  We recommend you to use to use this USB4/240W cable as it seems to work fine for many iPhone 15 Pro users.  

If issue still persists we recommend to contact the Apple support and explain your issue to them.