Setting up your drive

Storage Studio needs to know which external drive to use. You pick it once — during the Setup Wizard, or later from the More menu with Set Up / Choose External Drive… — and Storage Studio prepares it straight away. On the Home screen, the Connect an external drive to do more banner has a Set Up… button that opens the same place.

Step by step

1. Plug the drive in. It appears under Available drives. If nothing shows, click the rescan button. macOS's hidden Time Machine volumes aren't listed, and your Mac's own disk can't be chosen.
2. Select the drive. Storage Studio shows its details — where it's mounted, its Filesystem, its Protocol (connection) and Location — and a compatibility result: Compatibility: looks good, usable with warnings or not suitable, with the reasons. See Drive formats.
3. Optionally, test its speed. Click Run benchmark. It writes a 128 MB test file to the drive, reads it back and deletes it, in about 5–10 seconds. See Choosing an external drive for what the results mean.
4. Click Use This Drive. Confirm when asked — the button reads Use Anyway if the drive had warnings.
5. Storage Studio prepares the drive. When it's done you see that the drive is ready and Storage Studio is set up on it.

A drive marked not suitable can't be chosen.

%% caption: Setting up your external drive
flowchart TD
  A[Plug in the drive] --> B[Open Set Up or Choose External Drive]
  B --> C[Select the drive]
  C --> D{Compatibility}
  D -->|Not suitable| X[Pick another drive]
  D -->|Looks good or warnings| E[Optional speed test]
  E --> F[Use This Drive]
  F --> G[A folder for this Mac is created on the drive]
  G --> H[Check with Verify Setup]

What Storage Studio creates on the drive

Storage Studio makes one folder on the drive, named after your Mac. Everything Storage Studio keeps on the drive lives inside it, and the rest of the drive is left as it is. Because the folder is named after the Mac, several Macs can share one drive without mixing their files.

To see it, open the drive in Finder; Show in Finder in the Inspect window takes you there — see Checking your drive's health and setup.

Check that everything is in place

Choose Verify Setup… from the More menu. The Verify configuration window checks each part of the setup in turn. For the drive, the row Storage Studio folder on NVMe should say Storage Studio folder is in place and marked. If it says the folder is missing or unmarked, click Re-create.

Switching to a different drive

You can choose another drive the same way at any time. Choosing a new drive doesn't move what's already on the old one — folders and apps you moved stay there. To carry everything across first, use Transfer to a New Drive… — see Switching to a new drive. Unpair External Drive… in the More menu also opens Choose External Drive.

See also: The drive says "not set up", When your drive is disconnected, External drive.