You should be able to connect this drive to your Mac mini directly via the USB-A connector. If it doesn’t show up on the Desktop, check the following:
- If the drive isn't visible, open Preferences in the Finder menu on top of the screen, and check that External disks is selected under the General tab
- The drive might need to be reformatted because the file system is not compatible (with Seqouia). Open the Disk Utility on your Mac and see what drives are recognized. Then format it with APFS or exFAT file system.
all details of the Disk Utility can be found here: Disk Utility User Guide for Mac - Apple Support
Open the Disk Utility.
Select your external drive via the left sidebar. It shows up as External or Untitled, or something you might have named it with.
Click on it to highlight it. Make sure you’re not clicking on a partition below it, but rather the actual drive.
Then click on the Erase button on the top. Caution, this will erase everything on the selected drive. In order to reformat with the new file system, this is the only way to do that, make sure you are ok to erase the disk. Also, double check that you have highlighted the correct drive and not your Mac mini’s internal drive.
Once you click Erase, you can enter the name of your drive. Type in a name of your choice, eg. Backup
From the drop down choose APFS or exFAT as the format.
As the Scheme, you can enable GUID partition map, for added compatibility with Windows machines, in case you’d like to be able to connect your drive to a Windows computer at some point in time.
Click Erase to begin the process. It shouldn’t take more than a few moments.
Exit out of Disk Utility and you should see the drive on your Desktop
Now it should be recognized by Time Machine
