New uninitialised SSD not showing in Disk Utility I have bought a new Samsung EVO 850 SSD, it is yet unformatted. I have a SATAI/II to USB3.0 dock which I want to use to get the drive formatted, but it is just not showing up in Disk Utility (Recovery mode or plain) or even Disk Management on Windows. I have a Macbook Pro 17" Early-2011 [El Capitan 10.11.5] and want to clone my current HDD to this SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner.

The dock I am using is this exact one: https://www.amazon.com/Vantec-3-5-Inch-Drive-Black-NST-D300S3-BK/dp/B007B5PQW4

The SSD is this one: http://www.samsung.com/za/consumer/memory-storage/memory-storage/ssd/MZ-75E250BW

I have read of a few people successfully installing this drive into their Macbook Pro, but success eludes me.

Is the drive maybe broken? Or is the dock preventing the drive from showing up? Or am I doing something wrong.
Old thread, but just run to similar problem myself. My old HDD broke up, and had no chance to format my new SSD anywhere.

New disk was not listed on Disk Utility, when booted the machine with USB-installer and so that I was not able to format the disk and I was not getting nowhere. 

I noticed that I was able to run Terminal during installer (Top ribbon)

I checked all devices with command-line Disk Utility:

diskutil list


And the new Disk was listed there.

Then format using diskutil:

diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ NewDisk /dev/&lt;disk id&gt;      


The new disk was formatted and reboot. Disk was now listed on Disk Utility and I was able to install the macOS without issues.