Secondly, if you are using a USB-C dongle/hub, unplug it from your Mac and plug it into a different type-C port. Give it a few seconds and see if it is visible. But if you did not, unplug the drive from the current Mac’s USB port and plug it into another. This is a pretty common trick to solve such problems.

If everything is fine here, move on to the next step. Secondly, some drives have two ports, and both must be plugged into the computer. The power they get from Mac’s USB port is sufficient.īut if you have a big hard drive that requires external power, ensure you satisfy that.

Small hard drives, SSD, and pen drives might not require additional power. Make sure the drive is powered adequately # If the options are already checked, move on to the next fix. The first step is to ensure that external drives are allowed to show up on Mac’s desktop. Change Finder preferences to show the drive on Mac # External Hard Drive Not Recognized on Mac How to fix an external hard drive not recognized on Mac # 1. Now that you know the basics, let’s look at the fixes. Here are 7 reasons why your external pen drive, HDD, SSD, or other such drives may not be appearing on your Mac. Why is my external hard drive not showing up on Mac? # But first, let’s understand the possible reasons behind this. I don't want FAT32 either, because of the 4GB restriction.But don’t worry! I have rounded up the best fixes to eliminate the issue of an external hard drive not showing up on a Mac. I'm on MacOs Catalina 10.15.6 and using a WD Elements 2TB USB 3.0 INFO: I have a MacBook Pro 2017 13' (no touch bar). I've heard APFS is best optimised for SSDs, but does it work well with HDDs? Are there any restrictions? Is there a better alternative that wouldn't cause the problems I mentioned above? I could not use First Aid to repair it when it wouldn't mount after being force ejected, and I had to use Windows to fix it. Sometimes I could not eject the drive because 'it was being used by a program', although it wasn't being used. (I checked in spotlight privacy settings and the drive was not excluded.) 3. Folders with color tags in this hdd wouldn't show up when I used the tag filter, it only showed folders from other drives. Not being able to view hdd's content when searching for files using spotlight or search within folders etc. Some of the problems I had with ExFAT were:ġ. So, at this point, I'm asking you what is the best format for an external HDD for use on Mac. I had been having some problems with my new external hard drive using ExFAT.I realised I don't care if I can't use the drive with Windows, since I can just transfer the projects for Uni on my second hard drive to use them on the Uni's computer if needed.

Best format for external hard drive mac