External USB Drive TO MacBook Air

lurcher

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Hi,
Been using an external USB drive with my 2016 MacBook Air for 5yrs but this week it failed to load up and connect , so I bought a maxone 500GB external usb drive which arrived today .
I plugged it in , bleeping sound from hard drive and blue light one but no indication the drive was showing on the MacBook , I was expecting it to show on the desktop like my previous one did .
Looked in the system report on the Mac and I can see the maxone listed in the usb setting , no external disks are shown in the disc utility and not found in Time machine preferences where I wanted to access it for back up purposes .

Any ideas ?

TIA
 
Can you try a different USB port on the MacBook? Different cable too if you have a spare?
Also if it’s a hard drive and not a solid state drive. You should hear, feel the small vibration of the motor spinning up when it’s connected and running.
If there’s nothing. I suspect a dead hard drive and return for replacement.
 
Thanks for reply , yes its a hard drive , can't try a different cable as the one supplied with it has an unusual connection on the hard drive end that I"ve not seen before ( usb 3 to micro b )
Tried both USB ports on Mac , just bleeps 5 time on insertion steady blue light but no sound or vibration .
May try it on a different computer locally if I can find one before I return it to Amazon .
 
Yes small portable drive , just tried it with replacement lead and still no luck , no vibration or spinning noise .
Returning it to Amazon and just ordered an alternative make for del tomorrow .
 
Glad you got sorted.

I’ve been using some 1TB portable drives with my old iMac for years that won’t appear on the desktop of my newer Macs (M1 Mini and M1 Max MBP) - the drives are HFS+, they still work on the old iMac but it seems like they can’t get enough power from the new Macs.

I have some other 5TB portable drives that work fine on the M1 Macs, and additionally some 3TB drives with their own power supplies and they work fine too.
 

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