A few people have asked me what you should do
if your Mac doesn't detect your external drive
when you plug it in.
The answer is, it's actually pretty straightforward.
And in this short video,
I'm going to show you exactly what to do.
Firstly, does the external drive actually work?
You can verify this by plugging it into another computer
if you have one available.
It doesn't matter if it's a PC or Mac either,
you just want to make sure that it actually works.
You can test this by seeing if it comes up on the desktop
or going into file explorer or finder,
and seeing if it pops up at all.
The next step, and what is probably going to fix your issue,
is by properly formatting the drive in Mac OS.
Let's jump into my M1 MacBook Pro so I can show you.
Okay, so we are on my M1 MacBook Pro at the moment.
Now, before we go any further,
definitely do open up finder first of all.
And then you want to come up here to finder preferences,
and then you want to make sure that you are in general,
and you want to make sure that external disks
is ticked under these show, these items on the desktop
because you want to actually have this chunk come up
in the top corner when you do plug in your external drive.
So we'll close that down and we're going to actually
plug in our external drive at this point.
Now, as you might've seen in sort of the big roll
earlier on this video, I am using a Samsung T5 external SSD.
So I've just plugged this in now,
and you can see this is actually coming up.
But when I click on it, it opens up,
but there's no way for me to read
or write any kind of files or data onto this disc.
So the next thing you want to do,
is you want to make sure it's actually properly formatted
because Mac OS can only read and write
through particular drive formats.
So if we open up spotlight search,
and we search for disk utility,
and that's just the first one there.
We'll open up disk utility.
And as you can see here under the internal sections,
coming up with the actual hard drive of the Mac.
And under the external section,
you can see we have the Samsung T5.
Now, if it doesn't come up
in the top right-hand corner here,
hopefully it is coming up here.
If it does not come up here at this point,
what you want to do is you want to try a different cable
on the hard drive if you have one available,
and then you also want to restart your Mac,
just to make sure it's not anything
with the actual software.
Now, for most of you guys, you probably will see it here.
So what you want to do is you want to click on it.
Now, if you have previously formatted this Mac and you know
that it should be working, you can try doing a first aid
if the option is available to you.
That's going to try and repair the disc.
And it's going to try not to lose any of your data.
There's no guarantees, but it's just going to try
and fix any kind of bad sectors or errors on the drive.
And that might be why it's not coming up on your Mac.
For 99% of you though,
you're going to actually want to erase the drive
and essentially reformat it.
So we're going to click the erase button,
and we're going to give our drive a name.
So I'm just going to take the underscore out of there.
And you can see right now,
it's actually a windows NT file system format, so NTFS.
And that essentially means that Windows is the only device
that's going to actually be able to read this disc.
So you have two options now.
You can set it to Mac OS extended,
or you can set it to ExFAT.
Now, if you're only going to be using this drive
with Mac and Mac OS only, so no Windows computers,
choose Mac OS extended journal.
This is going to give you the best compatibility
and usability with your Mac.
However, if you want to be able to use this particular drive
on other devices, such as a TV or a Windows computer,
or something else, you're going to have to change it to ExFAT.
And that's essentially a universally compatible file format.
So for me personally with this drive,
I'm going to set it to ExFAT
'cause this is how I actually transfer stuff
between my Mac and my Windows PC.
So I'm going to click erase,
and that is going to erase and reformat the Samsung T5.
It's also going to change it from NTFS to ExFAT.
And as you can see there,
if we drop the details down, everything was successful.
So we're going to click done.
We're going to close down disk utility.
And if we now open up the Samsung T5, you can see there
that we are now able to drag and drop stuff in here.
So I'm just going to transfer some test files.
You can see that's transferred perfectly fine.
Everything's in there, and there's absolutely no issues.
Now, just a quick little extra.
Some people have asked me if it's necessary
to click the eject button before unplugging a disk.
In my opinion, it's not super necessary.
It is a good habit to get into
just in case anything's being read or written to the drive,
just before you eject it.
So my recommendation is just, yes,
click the little eject button, but if you forget,
it's not a big deal.
Anyway, that's it for me, guys.
Hopefully this fixed your issues.
If you have any comments or questions,
or you're still facing issues,
do leave a comment down in the comment section below,
and I'll do my best to get back to you.
But apart from that, I will catch you guys in the next one.