Cant Access WD Drive

[reliquit]

I have purchased a 4Tb Western Digital drive to use on my MacBook Air. I have several other drives but they are all LaCie brand - this is the first time I have bought a WD.

I have plugged it in, and run the "Installation for Mac" program as prompted, and now I can SEE the drive in Finder but I can't ACCESS it. Please can anybody tell me what I need to do.

Thanks.

EDIT: I just tried to re-name the drive and I can't do that either - so it seems to be a question of permissions. Why don't I have WRITE permission to my own drive?

 

[OldSchool]

Is it a HD or SSD?

 

[reliquit]

HD, and I'm running MacOS Sonoma

 

[OldSchool]

HD, and I'm running McOS Sonoma

Can you return it and get the biggest SSD you can find, the reason being and I quote JOE KISSELL

Performance on mechanical hard drives is terrible. I mean, almost completely unusable. (Fusion drives are better, but still not great.) So if your Mac still has a spinning disk, I suggest replacing.

Sonoma uses Apple File System (APFS) which is geared for SSD's. If you upgrade in the future to Sequoia (don't don't do it right now it's full of bugs with Version 15.0.1) it won't recognize HFS+ if the SSD was formatted in that format, you have to use APFS via Disk Utility.

Intro to Disk Utility on Mac​

or

Carbon Copy Clover Tutorial

 

[TonyAguila]

HD, and I'm running MacOS Sonoma

If you are determined to have a hard drive as your external storage, you should be able to format the drive using Disk Utility. You have a MacBook Air. Is it a Silicon (M1 or better)? Do you have USB-C Thunderbolt 3 or better? If that is true, I suggest getting an external NVMe SSD. At the moment, Amazon (and other dealers) are having their special deals days. The prices on 4-TB NVMe drives and enclosures are going for their best prices ever. You won’t regret it.

 

[Rodananne]

reliquit, did you have a reason to buy a HDD as opposed to an SSD? I know they are cheaper but that's probably not a good reason. SSD's are the future for sure and definitely run much faster but; if you cannot take it back there is no reason why you cannot make use of it. I have a WD HDD formatted as APFS which I use for Time Machine on a 1TB 16" 2024 MacBook Air running Sequoia 15.0.1 with ABSOLUTELY no problems.

Assuming the store won't refund you simply Erase it using Disk Utility (you don't need the Mac software it came with) then name it, format it as APFS (just APFS) and Map as GUID.

Initialise an external storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on your Mac, you can initialise an external storage device you connected to your Mac.

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