Your new external HD Mac

Creating a portable Big Sur drive in Disk Utility

Your external HD

Any drives connected to your Mac will appear in this sidebar under ‘External’. If it doesn’t appear on your desktop, go to Finder>preferences>general and tick the ‘External disks’ box to make them visible.

Running Big Sur

We can see from the icon here that the connected external HD is running Big Sur. You can switch disks again by restarting and holding down option/alt.

More room

External HDS also potentially provide significantly more storage space. The macos software requires roughly 15GB, so everything else is there to be utilised.

Formatting the HD

You can clean and format an external HD ready for macos in Disk Utility. Just select the drive you want to use and then click on the ‘Erase’ button at the top to kick-start the process.