SSD not being recognized by MacBook (15" early 2011)?

Hey!

Been looking all over to see if anyone has had this issue or knows what might be going on, but everything I stumble upon seems to not be quite right.

In December 2018 I installed an SSD where my optical drive was in my Macbook Pro. I just wanted extra storage space and it seemed easy enough. And it was! I followed the guides on here, put the drive in, and I’ve had a functional drive since.

Until this week. I booted up my Mac partition (I also have Bootcamp on my computer, although it’s allocated to the original HDD, but I’m not sure if that may be relevant). I was greeted with a message saying there was something wrong with my drive, and I had the option to either “Initialize, Ignore, or Eject”. I pressed Eject (seemed like the safest option? That’s what you do with drives right?) and the SSD was no longer appearing in finder, or in Disk Utility.

I booted again, this time into recovery mode. The SSD was in the Disk Utility and I repaired it successfully! I then started up the computer and everything was there, working as normal. I figured that was that!

Now it seems that that was not in fact, “that”. I booted up yesterday, and was greeted with the same message asking me to “Initialize, Ignore, or Eject”, and I repaired again by going into the Disk Utility, but I wonder if anyone knows how to permanently fix this, or at least understands what’s happening I’d love to know.

Thanks!