I bought a Western Digital "Elements" external drive recently and cannot back up my macbook laptop. It is shown in as an external drive in the finder side bar and I can see it in the disk utility but I cannot do anything with it.
It looks like i could use it like a flash drive/thumb drive to drag and drop files that doesn't work. What's going wrong?
Matt
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 13.7
Probably needs reformatting to GUID partition, APFS.
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
- Choose the appropriate system version in the drop down menu to get the correct document version.
Note that APFS is what is standard for drives these days, but it appears yours is a rotational disk drive. We can start a long discussion about this but there is a school that says that if you are not using this as a Time Machine backup that you may wish to instead format it to Mac Extended Journaled. You have not told us if you are going to be using backup utilities. Time Machine will want to make it an APFS drive which is debatably not optimal (and can be avoided if you really wish to) but I have also seen some just say go with it. This is a SMR style drive which isn't the best as an APFS backup drive but is common because they are cheaper. I am guessing they are still common because they target the Windows community that doesn't use APFS. I use a rotational backup drive but I bought a slightly more costly CMR drive.
Probably needs reformatting to GUID partition, APFS.
Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
- Choose the appropriate system version in the drop down menu to get the correct document version.
Note that APFS is what is standard for drives these days, but it appears yours is a rotational disk drive. We can start a long discussion about this but there is a school that says that if you are not using this as a Time Machine backup that you may wish to instead format it to Mac Extended Journaled. You have not told us if you are going to be using backup utilities. Time Machine will want to make it an APFS drive which is debatably not optimal (and can be avoided if you really wish to) but I have also seen some just say go with it. This is a SMR style drive which isn't the best as an APFS backup drive but is common because they are cheaper. I am guessing they are still common because they target the Windows community that doesn't use APFS. I use a rotational backup drive but I bought a slightly more costly CMR drive.
Some of these drives are pre-formatted as Microsoft Windows NTFS, and macOS can read but not write that format. Not without add-on tools.
Reformat it to a Mac native format using Disk Utility, selecting either Apple File System Journaled (HFS+) or APFS, and try again.
If problems persist, return this HDD or SSD for a refund and get a replacement.
Using Disk Utility, erase the drive and then try an APFS format again.
If still no luck, it is likely a drive problem. There's really nothing else that I can think of to try at this point, unless you have another Mac to try the drive out on.
Right-Click on the external drive and select Get Info.
Look for Format in the window that appears with info about the external drive.
What is the Format?
Thanks for the replies. This drive is formatted as APFS.
Need help with an external drive
