External Hard Drive (USB3.0) only works through USB2.0 hub

For quite a while now some of my external hard drives have not worked when directly plugged into my Macbook Pro (Mid 2012 running 10.8.5). They work perfectly when plugged into a USB hub and then into the macbook but not directly to the mac. Standard small USB flash drives work fine straight in to the macbook, the real problem appears to be USB 3.0 hard drives. These will not show up on desktop or disk utility unless I plug them in via a USB hub (which is USB2.0). The hard drive format doesn't seem to be important, currently my Mac OS Extended Time Machine backup HD is only working through USB hub, and my MyPassport WD external drive is NTFS and hasn't worked directly into the Mac for a while now.
Normally this is not a big issue, but when I am on the go it is useless to carry a USB hub around along with a MyPassport hard drive! In addition, there are times, such as when backing up, that I want the speeds offered by USB3.0 from my macbook to my hard drive.
What could be the problem? I run NTFS for Mac OSX, not sure if that would cause an issue with the direct connection.
Please help, this one is grinding my gears!
Thanks

WD Black 2TB back in summer sold for about $179 and excellent choice.
Very important as to what controller you get and what it supports, besides Mac Pro 2010, 64-bit mode drivers.
With 4 drives you may or may not want a card+case that is Port Multiplier.
To use 4 drives you may want 4-port SATA.
The ideal might be two PCIe cards and two cases, so your data and backup are not on same controller and case. Or not.
avoid Port Multiplication
(Positive) Reports from OS X users of eSATA PCIe cards with Port Multipler cases
Sonnet Tempo SATA 6Gb 2-Port PCI Express
NewerTech MAXPower eSATA 6G
http://eshop.macsales.com/search/pcie+Serial+ATA
WD Black 1.5TB $169 / 2TB $249
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Internal-Desktop/dp/B004CSIG1G/ref= sr_1_12?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1329431263&sr=1-12
Cheaper on WDC site but Out of Stock
http://store.westerndigital.com/promo/86120800
I'd go with 1.5TB models throughout: replace the 2 x 500GB which sound older and 2007 era? setup 3 x 1.5TB if you think you want 1.5-1.8TB for active projects on your internal drives (3 drive array)
Or there is this:
http://www.macperformanceguide.com/blog/2012/20120216_1-Hitachi-Coolspin-4TB.htm l

Similar Messages

Is there a way to access my iTunes Library, which is stored on a (PC) External Hard Drive, on a MacBook Air (through an Apricorn Universal Hard Drive Adapter), without transferring the music files off of the external hard drive?

Is there a way to access my iTunes Library, which is stored on a (PC) External Hard Drive, on a MacBook Air (through an Apricorn Universal Hard Drive Adapter), without transferring the music files off of the external hard drive?
In other words, because the MacBook Air only has 120 gbs of hard drive space & my old hard drive, from a Lenovo, has 500 gbs of hard drive space (and I have over 120 gbs of music), I’m looking to manage my iTunes music from the external hard drive permanently. Upon attempting to access the iTunes library held on the external hard drive the following message comes up: “The iTunes Library.itl file is locked, on a locked disk, or you do not have write permission for this file”. Is there a way to get around this?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks so much!

You will have to engage a split library which means you will have to start answering questions on this forum because you will need to learn a lot about how iTunes works in order not that have a big mess at the end of it all. It also won't be easy when the time comes to relocate it all to different drives.
You can go to advanced preferences and turn off organize media and copy to items to media folder when adding items to library. Next read about how to selectively consolidate items to the external drive.
Sept. 2010, Consolidate selected content - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2589812 and April 2014, https://discussions.apple.com/message/25414357
"...selected the new tracks directly in iTunes, Control-clicked on the selection, and saw that now you can consolidate selected items." - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090919000326840
Remember that when you start iTunes without the external drive turned on iTunes will present you with a bunch of broken links. If you have automatic downloads enabled with iCloud you may have to turn that off to prevent iTunes from repopulating your drive trying to deal with those "missing" tracks.
If you add tracks in bunches to iTunes and want them to go to different media folders you will need to either add them by holding down the option key while dragging if the desired media folder is not the one set in preferences, or by changing the media folder in preferences. Changing media folder preferences only applies to new files added, not old ones.
Okay, I am going to stop typing because you might just reply to me, "Oh, okay, forget it," and I don't need the exercise.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391

External Hard Drive Becomes Read Only

I have a LaCie Hard Drive that Time Machine has been backing up to for about 4 days now. All of a sudden, the external hard drive is read only. When I go into Get Info for the hard drive, I can't even change the read/write permissions - it's all grayed out. This is the second time it's happened. The first time was on a Western Digital MyBook. TM fried that drive. At least this drive hasn't disappeared like the last time.
I've now changed the Time Machine backup to my second hard drive on my Mac Pro (which is screaming along, as opposed to the FW800 [!!] backup on my La Cie, whose file transfers are slo-o-o-w).
The idea behind backing up onto the external was so that if I ever needed to leave during a fire or earthquake, I could bring this with me and not worry if my computer was destroyed. Insurance would replace the computer, and I could replace my system.
If it weren't formatted properly, it wouldn't have been backing up for the last few days.
Can anyone help?
Message was edited by: Theresa Mesa

Thank you to everyone who has posted about this issue -- it just happened to me AGAIN this morning (this is my 3rd time), after I installed the 10.5.2 update. The first two times were right after I hooked up my external Iomega 500GB drive to use with Time Machine and I thought it was something I was doing. Then it seemed to work fine for a couple months so I thought the problem was over. Guess not! It is frustrating because I just lost about 2 months worth of backups. So finally I searched Apple's discussion forums and saw that I am not alone. However, no one was really posting a solution other than to say "reformat the drive".
So I did a Google search about this topic and encountered the following article. I have just gone through the steps he outlines and although I won't know for awhile if it works, I figure at this point it can't hurt to try. I hope this proves useful to others as well. (One note -- in his article, he says to skip the Erase tab and go right to the Partition tab. If you don't see the Partition tab, first erase your corrupt Time Machine backup disk and then follow his steps.)
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/leopard-disk-utility-format-issue-screws-with-t ime-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php
Cheers ~
Message was edited by: sneebish

How can I store my music files on an external hard drive and listen to them through iTunes that way?

How can I store my music files on an external hard drive and listen to them through iTunes that way? At the moment they're both on the external hard drive and also stored on the computer but I'm quickly running out of memory on my iBook G4 so I'd like to only keep them on the external hard drive and, if possible, delete them from my computer's hard drive. At the moment, when the hard drive isn't plugged in a lot of the files won't play and I get the exclamation mark next to the particular song in iTunes, but everything plays fine when the hard drive is plugged in.
Thank you.

Sounds like your files are playing from the external drive already. To check go to iTunes - Preferences - Advanced and check the Media Folder Location. Change it to the external drive if you need to.

External Hard Drive WD - suddenly "only read"

Hi guys,
My External Hard Drive, that does have enough free space and does work without problems on my PC, suddenly displays "only read" on the "show information" from File menu (btw, sorry for the expressions, my Mac is in spanish and I'm translating it in how I think it could be in english). So, I can't copy any new files on it. It happened from one day to another.
The other external hard drive I have does work well on the Mac.
I tried to follow the instructions from the Help menu, but didn't see any options for modifying the "permit" ("permisos" in spanish) from "only read" to "write and read" like I see on the other external memory.
Could somebody help me with this problem? Thanks a lot in advance!

Windows does not acknowledge the existence of Macs. A Mac formatted drive is not readable by a Windows machine.
I haven't tried this:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/ntfs3g.html
But it looks good...

Time Machine once worked, now external hard drive is "read only"

I have a 2005 iMac G5, running OS X 10.5. Had some power issues, and reinstalled (and archived) my OS a couple of time.
Recently purchased Western Digital 1TB external hard drive for back up. It worked once or twice, but now shows "read only" status.
Disk Utility won't do anything, because it's read only (can't repair, erase, partition or convert).
Hard drive works on PC running Windows 7, and newer Mac with Snow Leopard, just not the one computer I need it for. Any suggestions?

This may help:
What to do if Time Machine reports you don't have permission
This was posted in the Apple Discussions by V.K. I have only modified it slightly to be more generic.
The problem seems to be that 10.5.6 changes permissions on a file so that even the root user doesn't have write peivileges. I have no idea why they did this. The workaround suggested in [an]other post will probably work, too, but i did something less drastic. Instead of deleting the file I changed permissions on it, and it worked just fine. An added benefit is that the permission change seems to stick, so you don't have to delete the file every time you change a drive.
[Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt [enter] the following command:
sudo chmod 644 /volumes/"TM drive name"/.xxxxxxxxxxxx
The name of the file .xxxxxxxxxxxx is based on the MAC address of your computer and will be different for every computer. Put the name of the TM drive in the above and keep the quotes.
You'll have to enter your admin password (which you won't see) which is normal.
This was edited by Kappy just for cleanup.
Enable Finder to Show Invisible Files and Folders
Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt enter or paste the following command line then press RETURN.
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
To turn off the display of invisible files and folders enter or paste the following command line and press RETURN.
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
Alternatively you can use one of the numerous third-party utilities such as TinkerTool or ShowHideInvisibleFiles - VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Also visit the User Tips found at the top of this forum's Topics list: Time Machine User Tips.

I have partitions in my external hard drive, and it was working fine. but not the oy, I have partitions in my external hard drive, and it was working fine. but not the other partition says you can only read. how to solve it ? help me

Mu external hard disk partition is not working. In get info it says that "hou can read only" bow can I fix this?

Read this:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/fix-permissions-imac-external-hard-drive-48257.ht ml

MacBook Pro crashed while deleting old backups off partitioned external hard drive. Now only recognizes windows formatted half of drive. Can the Apple side be saved?

MacBook Pro 15-inch, Mid 2010
Processor 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB
Software OS X 10.9.5 (13F34)
I have an external hard drive:
2 TB Seagate Backup+Desk Media
Partitioned:
1TB - Windows NTFS
1TB - Mac (sorry I can't remember the formatting, whatever Mavricks asked me to use...)
What happened:
I was erasing 3 old backups from the Apple partition and my laptop crashed part way through emptying the trash. (it has done this many times before, where parts of the screen are frozen in square blocks displaced all over the screen. Screenshot not possible unless I use a separate camera).
When I force restarted my computer (holding down the power button) neither side of the drive was accessible. After running the Disk Utility and Verifying and Repairing the Disk Permissions and the Disk Itself (for the Windows side) I was able to access the Windows partition. However, upon attempting to do so with the Mac partition it tells me that it cannot be repaired. I have found many forums discussing SIMILAR situations but none with the same and here is why:
Up until this happening I could access ONLY the Windows partition when the drive was connected to either my Apple laptop in Bootcamp Windows 7 or my HP laptop in Vista, while my MacBook could access both sides of the drive. HOWEVER, after this crash, BOTH my Windows 7 and Vista can access both sides of the drive (so My files are still all there and accessible) but my MacBook Pro swears that the Apple partition is doomed.
Since the Apple side of my laptop is my primary workhorse I really want to figure out how to fix my drive.
So Questions:
1. Anything else I can provide to the experts out there to help me get this fixed?
2. Can I custom fix this via accessing the drive on either of the Windows systems?
3. Why would it suddenly show up in Windows when it became unaccessible to Mac?
Thanks All!

UPDATE:
It has been maybe a month since this happened.
After I made this post and was checking emails, walking away from computer, and then came back my Mac partition of the External Drive has shown up on the Desktop...
So, in the ever immortal way of asking the tech to come check the issue and the issue resolving itself, perhaps I should posted on the forum sooner...
NOTE: The disk still shows up as unusable in the Disk Utility and it appears that the files are read only (cannot make a new folder on this side of the external drive)
I still consider this a volatile issue because I do not want to lose the files on this half of the partition and I have not gotten a replacement drive yet (too much data to move to my computer and then format the current drive)

External Hard Drive is no longer working

Hello. I have had a external hard drive for about 4 months now and it had been working fine. I have my iPhoto library on it along with all things related to my films that i make. After seeing some problems with iPhoto i upgraded to Aperture. I had to rebuild the library because something was wrong with it but after i did that, it loaded in Aperture fine and i was able to use it. I then verified and repaired my external disk, in the sake on making sure everything was okay. i then turned my computer off and went to bed. The next day when i tried to open the library, i couldn't open becuase the library was "locked." after i while, i realized that the entire disk had become "read only." after trying to fix it for the past couple of days by looking into forums and using terminal and exerything, nothing has worked. Now, the disk cannot verify on repair at all, and i still can't change it at all. This disk is very important, and I don't use Time Machine or have a backup. I was going to set it up, but that was the day that i found that is was locked. I would love some help so please try and help me find the problem so we can fix it thank you!
PS i have noticed the disk is a NTFS, but it has been that since i started using it. and it is a Seagate Free Agent Go Flex Drive 1.5tb.
Thanks again
nic

Hi,
Apple doesn't supply a read/write driver for NTFS with any of its operating systems. Are you using a third-party NTFS driver, such as the one supplied by Paragon? If so, that's likely the source of the problem. If not, then something strange is going on, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it…

I need a step-by-step plan: my WD external hard drive is 'read only'

Hi,
I hope someone can help me, because i'm in quite a pickle. I bought a WD 500 GB external hard drive a couple of months ago. I have a MacBook Pro version OS X 10.8.5. The problem I have now is that I haven't used my external hard drive for a couple of weeks now, until today (note: I bought this hard drive and used it for the first time on my macbook pro, never on windows before or any other laptop/pc), and all of a sudden I can only 'read' my hard drive, it suddenly seemed to have changed it settings by itself to 'you can read only' whilst I never did anything to the permission settings....
So i read a couple of questions about this online, and apparently im not the only one with this problem. but all the answers i read are way too complicated for me, with too much computer jargon. Therefore i just need a simple step-by-step answer, whatever i need to install or 'configure' in order to make this thing work again!!
Please can somebody help me??? I never used this thing for more than a month and only my macbook pro....help!! It cant be that i used this hard drive once and then all of a sudden it changes it's settings??
Thanks,
Daphne

If you can see the hard drive in Finder, select it, do a Get Info (command - I) and see what permissions you have in Sharing and Permissions. It should be Read/Write. If it isn't, unlock the padlock, and change it. Then look towards the top to see how the drive is formatted. It normally should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
If it is not that format, go to Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. Open Disk Utility select the drive, select the erase partition, and after making sure the correct format is set, erase the drive. At the bottom the current format is shown. This will remove anything that was on the drive.

External Hard Drive Is "Read Only"

Hi,
I'm currently running OSx Lion on my MacBook Pro and I recently wanted to use my external hard drive to transfer some files from my Mac to my PC. The problem is, after plugging my exxternal into my Mac, I noticed I only have the ability to "read" the files on the external. The external hard drive is a Maxtor OneTouch 4 and it is a Windows NT File System (NTFS).
When I do "command+I" and go to "Sharing & Permisions" it just says "you can only read". There are no other options, no padlock icons... Nothing.
Is there any way I can fix this? If so, can it be put simply (I am still struggling to use a Mac, as you can see, haha).
Thanks in advance!

Mac will not write to a NTFS volume. There are third-party apps out there which can fix that, but I've no idea if they'll work with Lion.
If you need to transfer files between Mac and PC regularly, re-format the drive as FAT32 (or exFAT, aka FAT64, if the windows version supports it).
exFAT would be preferable if it's available as FAT32 has a file size limitation of 4GB.

External Hard drive suddenly will only read! How can I make it read/write again?

Hi folks,
I'm working with a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 320gb External Hard Drive on the imacs here at my university. I have it formatted to ExFAT so that I could use it with my pc as well but I've never had to so far so it's only ever been used on the uni imacs.
It's been fine for working on media projects until suddenly when i came back to uni after the Christmas break I went to continue working on a film project and realised the external hard drive now said read only??
One thing I did was to put all of my work from last semester (which is everything that was on the hard drive into a single folder) could that have caused the problem?
And does anyone know how i can reset my permissions to read/write without causing damage or risk to the files on the hard-drive as I can't clear the disk (i have no where else to store the 185gb of video footage).
I'd really appreciate it if anyone could tell me how i can fix it? I know how to do all of this on my pc but i've no idea with the mac as i only use it for my media projects here in the university.
Thanks!
DrF ;-)

Out of curiosity , will this method also work for an external drive formatted to NTFS.. I have a lot of data that I have nowhere to Float while re-formatting the drive , so If this method would allow me to keep the data and still fix the problem that would be great !! At the moment the drive is formatted to NTFS and permissions say Read/Write , but I can only Read.. Very Frustrating as my mac drive is running low on space and performance is being affected.. Any help appreicated !!

External hard drive becomes "read only" and won't let Time Machine back up

I have an external hard drive for back up, and it has been working fine until recently.
There is a version of 10.6.6 loaded on it also.
The back up will fail every few days. When I do some checking, the back up drive is "read only" but I am not able to switch it to read/write. I cannot repair it with Disk Utility as the repair buttons are grayed out.
I can run DiskWarrior and it will fix it, but it runs super slow and takes all the memory to do it. I can barely use my e mail while it's running.
Anyone know what's going on?

System log says:
3/27/11 8:01:19 AM com.apple.backupd-auto[1559] Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup - time machine destination not resolvable.
It's read only because:
A: I cannot do repairs under Disk Utility, the buttons are grayed out.
B: I right click and "Get Info" and if I click on the lock icon, nothing happens.
C: The disk is not listed in the Time Machine backups.
I will try to take better notes the next time it happens and give you the exact messages.
There is another drive daisy chained to this external drive which holds my music. The music drive does not have a Mac OS installed on it and is only for storage. It works properly.

My mac will not properly read the iphoto library on external hard drive. It only reverts back to the library on the computer instead.

I have an iphoto library on an external drive, which I have connected to my airport extreme. I can see the disk in my finder and access data on the external hard drive through the wireless, local network. The only problem is that when I use my iMac, the machine does not read the iphoto library on the external harddrive, instead it picks up the library that's on the iMac itsel. Is this a preferences list issue or something else? Any help would be great, thank you.

A strong warning: If you're trying to edit the Library (that is, make albums, move photos around, keyword, make books or slideshows etc.) or edit individual photos in it via Wireless be very careful. Dropouts are a common fact of wireless networking, and should one occur while the app is writing to the database then your Library will be damaged. Simply, I would not do this with my Libraries.

New external hard drive is read only... why?

Ok I have bought an external hard drive and plugged it all in. It has shown up on my desktop but when I tried moving files to it it said that the hard drive can not be modified. I checked and it says that it is read only.... why?!
Do I need to do something or is it just not working?
Might it need reformating if so how do I do that? I am a virgin when it comes to things like this so someone please deflower me!

Under the Get Info window, check to see if the disk's format is listed as NTFS or Windows NT filesystem; if it is, you will need to reformat it before you can write to it on a Mac. To reformat a disk, open the Disk Utility in your /Applications/Utilities/ folder, click the Erase tab, provide a format and a name, and confirm this action.
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External Hard Drive (USB3.0) only works through USB2.0 hub

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