I had almost the same thing happen. Turned on my Mac Mini one day and it just could not see the SSD. Not even in Recovery mode. Took it in and the “Genius” test

I had almost the same thing happen. Turned on my Mac Mini one day and it just could not see the SSD. Not even in Recovery mode. Took it in and the “Genius” tested it and said that the drive wasn’t working. They offered to replace my 1TB SSD for some large amount of money. I asked if they would sell me a replacement cable so I could see if it was the drive or the cable. Nope. Had to get it third-party, which cost next to nothing. And of course the only reason these cables fail is because they’re wafer thin and designed for laptops. When’s the last time you heard of a full-size hard drive cable failing? Never. If Apple would release a “real” desktop computer that was toaster sized instead of mini, this wouldn’t be an issue.