As we all know, an external hard drive has a lot of advantages. If your internal hard drive is nearly filled, you need an external hard drive to expand your storage capacity. In addition, you need an external hard drive to deal with the emergent things in case that your computer’s internal hard drive becomes disabled. And also you can back up your important files and data to keep them from losing. Today’s article is to tell you how to install an external hard drive on your Mac to help you to do all the things mentioned above.
First you have to check what the port of your external hard drive is. USB or FireWire cable is available for your Mac connecting with your external hard drive. If your external hard drive can be compatible with both connection types, you’d better choose FireWire which offers faster data transfer speeds than USB.
The second step is to attach your external hard drive to your Mac. You need to plug the USB or FireWire cable to the right port on the hard drive and also attach the other end of the cable to your Mac’s USB or FireWire port.
Then, please connect the AC adapter to the hard drive and plug it into an outlet if the hard drive needs external power. If the external hard drive doesn’t need the external power, it will start automatically after you connect the drive to your Mac.
After that you have to make sure the Mac can recognize the hard drive. If you connect the hard drive correctly, an icon will appear with the name of the hard drive to show that it is active.
The last but not least, you have to test the drive whether it works or not. The way to check is to transfer a file to the external hard drive by dragging it onto the external hard drive’s Desktop icon.
From the above, you can see that it is very easy to install an external hard drive into your Mac. Hope you master it.