I have some SATA windows-formatted hard drives that I want to read on my Mac. I have the SATA to USB interface which seems to be working, because it lights up, and also it worked with my window machine. How can I read these on my M1 Mac mini?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Mounting windows drive on mac
Mac mini, macOS 15.5
shandeleo wrote:
No. It also doesn't appear in NTFS for Mac. It's does show up on a Window computer, although it's been a while since I tried that.
You need to confirm these drives still work with a Windows system. Hard Drives can have issues spinning up or releasing their drive heads if they have been left sitting an extended period of time. If they are SSDs, then the data on the SSD can degrade over time unless the SSD is connected to power once in a while to refresh the SSD's NAND memory cells (usually takes a year or two for this to occur although I have seen a few people mention it has happened in as little as six months).
You should not need any third party drivers to access an NTFS volume on a Mac. macOS has built NTFS read-only driver. When I researched NTFS Mac and some of the related software a couple years ago, I found out it has not been updated in quite a while and forks of the various projects are quite buggy at the moment (or a year or two ago anyway) with data destroying bugs. Personally I would not touch it these days.
You need to first determine if those drives are physically seen by macOS & Disk Utility. Unfortunately Disk Utility now hides physical drives from view by default. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show Details" before the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility.
Also, does your USB to SATA adapter have its own power supply? Even a 2.5" drive may sometimes need a dedicated power adapter. A 3.5" drive definitely needs a dedicated power supply. With the M-series Macs things can sometimes be tricky with external drives. Sometimes they need to be connected directly to the computer while other times they need to be connected to a USB3 hub (powered hub is best option although some have mentioned it was not necessary).
It is best to disconnect all other external devices just in case they are causing a problem.
does it show up in diskutil
No. It also doesn't appear in NTFS for Mac. It's does show up on a Window computer, although it's been a while since I tried that.
How can I read SATA Windows drives on my Mac mini M1?
