How to Use External Hard Drive on Mac?

Why Can't I Use my External Hard Drive on my Mac?

Sometimes when you connect an external hard drive to your Mac, youll find that its set to read only. This happens because the drive is formatted with Microsofts NTFS filesystem, which macOS doesnt support by default. Fortunately, its easy to fix so that your external hard drive is no longer read only.

How do I Move Files from Mac to External Hard Drive?

Connect an external hard drive to the computer using the USB cable and wait for the icon for that drive to appear on the Desktop.
Click "Finder" on the Desktop to launch a new Finder window, and then locate the files to transfer to the external hard drive.

How do I Get my WD External Hard Drive to Work on my Mac?

Connect your Western Digital hard drive to your Mac computer .
Doubleclick the drive icon that appears on your desktop.
Click "Applications" from the left pane, "Utilities" from the second pane and then double click "Disk Utility" from the third pane.
Click the drive from the left pane of the Disk Utility.

How to Set Up & Use External Hard Drive on MacBook Air

Search on the top right hand side of your screen. And youre just gonna type in disk utility . Like so and just open it up we are gonna select the second option.

Can you Use a Regular External Hard Drive for a Mac?

Generally, yes —for the most part, a hard drive is a hard drive, and any hard drive you buy for a Windows PC should work fine on a Mac as well.

How do I Set up an External Hard Drive?

Connect the USB cable to the hard drive if not already connected and the other end to a USB port on the computer. Plug the other end of the USB cable into a USB port on the computer. After connecting the external hard drive to the computer, it should be recognized automatically by your computers operating system .

How do I Get my Hard Drive to Work on my Mac?

Connect the drive to the Mac.
Open Disk Utility.
Select the drive you want to format.
Click Erase.
Give the drive a descriptive name and leave the default settings : OS X Extended format and GUID partition map.
Click Erase and OS X will format the drive.

How do you Transfer Files from a Mac to a Hard Drive?

Select the location on your hard drive into which you want to transfer the items. Browse to the folder on your external drive where you want to store the files or folders and then drag and drop folders and files from your Macs Finder window into the external hard drives window.

How do you Open a Hard Drive on a Mac?

Go to the Menu bar , and then, move to "Finder". Next, click on the "Preferences" option. Next, select the "General" tab when the Finder preferences window appears on your Mac screen. After that, check the box "Hard disks" under "Show these items on the desktop".

How do I Get my External Hard Drive to Work on my Mac?

Go to Applications → Utilities → Disk Utility. You should be able to see the external hard drive under the External heading in the sidebar on the left. Click on it to open the drive's information. In the menu bar at the top of the window, click on Erase and choose the format compatible with your Mac device.

How do I Add an External Hard Drive to my Mac?

Plug the hard drive into the Mac using the cable that came with it. Most hard drives connect via USB, so youll just need to plug the USB cable into an open port on your Mac. Youll typically find at least one USB port along each side of the Mac.

How do I Connect an External Hard Drive to my Macbook Pro?

Just plug the external drives USB cable into your PC and copy your files to the drive. After everything is copied, shut down Windows, unplug the hard drives data cable from the PC, and plug the cable into your Mac. The drives letter or name should appear on your Macs desktop.