So, you just bought an external hard drive or a portable SSD and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive.
Solution 4: Show external SSD in Finder or on desktop. In general, when you connect your external SSD with Mac, it can appear in Finder or on desktop. But if external disks are not set to show in Finder or on desktop, your external SSD won't show up on Mac. Step 1: Go to Finder Preferences Sidebar/General tab.
With newer Macs your SSD and RAM may be embedded into the motherboard, making it difficult or impossible to increase when you run out of space. External SSDs are a simple and effective way of increasing your storage while maintaining the fast speeds you’re accustomed to.
That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. Apple Mac machines support a different file system.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set.
Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like Data Rescue to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary.
Connect your SanDisk® SSD to your Apple Mac system via USB adaptor, the Mac OS will pop up a message: 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer', please select Initialize. Disk Utility will pop up, if not, open Disk Utility and you shall see the SSD listed under External. Amazon.com: external ssd mac. Seagate Fast SSD 1TB External Solid State Drive Portable – USB-C USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STCM1000400) 4.3 out of 5 stars 42. $168.67 $ 168. 67 $189.99 $ 189. Get it as soon as Fri, Aug 2. FREE Shipping by Amazon.
Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine – a 2TB Seagate Expansion. I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I’ll also show you how to do that below.
Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS
During the last several years, I’ve used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others.
Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see those High Sierra issues I encountered).
When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this.
When I opened it, the default content was all there. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”.
It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac.
I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. It showed this format:
Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here; you can read more on Wikipedia. The problem is that on macOS, you can’t work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app Paragon NTFS for Mac.
How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)?
Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5. They might be different if your Mac has a different version.
Step 1: Open Disk Utility.
The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
Step 2: Highlight your external drive and click “Erase”.
Make sure your drive is connected. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below.
Step 3: Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in Format.
A new window will pop up asking which file system you’d like to format the external drive to. By default, it’s the Windows NT File System (NTFS). Select the one shown below.
Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select “ExFAT”. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread.
By the way, you can also rename your external drive.
Step 4: Wait until the erasing process is complete.
For me, it took less than a minute to format my 2TB Seagate Expansion.
You can also check to see if the format was successful. Right-click on the icon for your external drive on Mac desktop, then select “Get Info”. Under “Format”, you should see text like this:
Congratulations! Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want.
How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac
If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Highlight your drive and click “Partition” in Disk Utility.
Open the Disk Utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Make sure you select the disk icon right under “External”. If you select the one below it, the Partition option will be greyed out and become unclickable.
Step 2: Add partitions and allocate volume for each one.
After clicking “Partition”, you’ll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add “+” button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition. You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around.
After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it.
Step 3: Confirm your operation.
Once you hit “Apply”, a new window pops up asking for your confirmation. Take a few seconds to read the text description to make sure it reflects what you intend to do, then click the “Partition” button to continue.
Step 4: Wait until it says “Operation successful.”
To check whether the operation is really successful, go to your Mac desktop. You should see multiple disk icons show up. I chose to create two partitions on my Seagate Expansion — one for backup, the other for personal use. You can find more info in this post: How to Backup Mac to an External Hard Drive.
That wraps up this tutorial article. I hope you find it helpful. As always, let me know if you have any issues during the formatting or partitioning process.
In this article, I will show How to Install & Run macOS Mojave From External SSD. You may think that it’s impossible to run two operating systems at the same time in one computer, and that should be from External SSD. Yes at the same you can install two operating systems in a single drive, internal Drive and External Drive. The macOS Mojave is till now having more user then the latest operating system, which is macOS Catalina. Due to having high-security performance and high graphic that allows the user to use macOS Mojave in an easy method. However, our purpose of installing macOS Mojave in External SSD is that, that we should have and get more experience. And macOS Mojave is the fifteenth major release of Apple Inc. After the release date of macOS Mojave till now Apple company worked on the features and bring many changes to it.
macOS Mojave announced in 2018 by Apple and till now they are releasing the latest update to the public. Therefore, besides many operating developed for Mac computers. And many people are preferring macOS Mojave more than other operating systems, and now those who are having Mac computers they are using macOS Mojave.
Install & Run macOS Mojave From External SSD
The process of installing macOS Mojave into an External SSD drive is much easy. It doesn’t matter whether you are having HDD or SSD or you are having Flash Drive. But it is important that the drive you have should work properly. After all, while you are going to install macOS Mojave into your SSD drive, remember one thing that has a perfect back up of your file. Some times it can happen that during the installation you may face any error or stuck. For macOS Mojave installation we need a good computer with high graphic because running two macOS operating in one computer is heavy. The Mac you have any macOS operating system should be installed on that. Follow the picture description until the end of the article.
Related:
Erase the External SSD for macOS Mojave
Insert the Blank SSD and open your Mac computer and navigate to the launchpad
Open the Launchpad
While the Launchpad has opened open the “Other” folder then open the Disk Utility.
Disk Utility
When the Disk Utility opened, choose the drive you inserted. And click on “Erase” then give a name to macOS Mojave installation, and select the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) then click Erase.
Erase the Blank SSD
In this step, you will see a warning that. Do you want to use macOS Mojave SSD (119.55 GB) to back up with time machine? Time machine will copy all everything to your Mac. Therefore, we don’t need this process click on Don’t Use.
Back up with Time Machine
Erasing the SSD drive. it will take a while waiting for this process to create the SSD drive for macOS Mojave. When the erasing is completed click on Done.
Erasing the SSD
Install macOS Mojave Beta on External SSD
After that, erasing is completed close Disk Utility then go to setting then click on “Install macOS Mojave Beta”.
install macOS Mojave Beta
After that, you clicked on install macOS Mojave beta the setup installation window will come then click continue.
macOS Mojave Beta
Agree to the terms and condition of macOS Mojave and click continue.
Agree to terms and condition
Because you are using one Internal Drive, and one External SSD for the purpose of macOS Mojave installation. From here you can select the drive for macOS Mojave installation. When this window appeared then click on Show all disks.
Show all disks
When you clicked on “Show all disks” the list of disks will come. There you will see the disk which you formated for macOS Mojave, then choose that macOS Mojave SSD, then clicks on Install.
External Ssd For Mac 4tb
choose macOS Mojave SSD
In order to continue installing macOS Mojave Beta, you need to log in as an Administrator. To install macOS Mojave trying to add new helper tool. For this option enter your “Username” and password then click on Add helper.
Add helper
macOS Mojave Beta is currently installing on External SSD. Therefore, the installation will take at least 18 minutes.
macOS Mojave complete installation on External SSD
Installing macOS Mojave on External SSD, this process also will take some times.
In the welcome window choose your country then click continue.
Select your Wifi network then click continue.
Choose Don’t transfer information right now to this Mac, and click continue.
Agree to terms and condition and click continue.
Create a computer account and click continue.
In Express set up don’t do anything simply click continue.
Choose your look and click continue.
Open the Start-Up Disk and click on the Lock to make changes.
System preferences trying to unlock the Startup Disk preferences, enter the password to allow this.
Conclusion
That’s all about How to Install & Run macOS Mojave from External SSD. However, I hope you have gotten something from this article. If the article was useful for you to share your suggestion and give us feedback. And don’t forget to subscribe to our Blog via your email address and wait for the latest post updates from techsprobe.