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Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at managing external drives.
Now if you have an external drive hooked up to your Mac it's important to know how to
properly eject it and also how to properly connect your Mac to the drive.
If you have an external drive connected to your Mac you should see it in the Finder in
the left sidebar. In this case I can see it right here under Devices. If you don't see
Devices or you don't see the drive there make sure that you have under Finder Preferences
you've turned on, under Devices, external disks. You can see if I turn it off there
I don't see that external drive there anymore.
So I can now select it and see what is on the drive. But most importantly, for what
we are talking about here, I've got the eject button. I need to hit that eject button to
properly eject the drive. Whether it is a USB drive that is put directly into the USB
port or it's a larger drive using a cable plugged into the USB it's important that you
eject it properly first before unplugging it from your Mac.
When you press this it might take a few seconds for it disappear. After it disappears you
know it is okay to remove.
Once you've done that normally you would then remove the drive or disconnect it. But suppose
you don't want to. Suppose you actually now want to reconnect and you've never actually
removed it.
There is several ways to do this. I see people going to all sorts of extremes, including
restarting their Mac completely, to connect back. But you don't have to do that.
One quick way that people do it, that is not quite the proper way, is to simply remove
the drive, wait a second or two, and then plug the drive back in. This works in most
cases and it is very convenient.
Another thing you can do is you can run Disk Utility, which is on your Mac, and you can
see that drive on the left here. Actually you will see two things and it is kind of
confusing because you can see External, that's the name of my drive, but you will also see
this up here. This is the actual physical device. These are the volumes on it. Typically
you have one volume on a drive but you can have multiple partitions and see multiple
volumes.
Now notice that I've got this Mount/Unmount button here. If this drive had been ejected
I would still see this here, I would see External but it is kind of grayed out because it has
been unmounted and this Unmount button would change to Mount, I click Mount and it will
remount the drive and I never had to remove it, never had to do anything extreme like
restarting my Mac, or anything like that.
If you have an external drive that has a power surge on it normally you would eject the drive
and then power it down but you don't have to necessarily disconnect the cable. So if
you power it back on after that it should mount automatically.
So what happens if you ejected it by accident. Well, you can simply power it down, wait a
few seconds, and then power it up again. It should mount just fine.
Now if you have a MacBook and say you have an external drive connected or even an USB
thumb drive and you put the MacBook to sleep, say you close the lid and you forget to eject
the drive first, then the proper thing to do is to wake it back up again, properly eject
the drive and then put it back to sleep. That's the only way to be sure that there won't be
any damage done to the files or to
the drive.
I hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.