Once the drive is located, select it and click the ‘ +’ icon as above, and then follow the rest of the steps as usual. Browse will perform a quick search of your network to locate the network drive if the drive has been set up for network discovery, which is automatic on most network devices. Select the little clock icon to reconnect to a previously used network drive or Browse. If you don’t have the network address on hand, you can do one of two things. You can double-click or right-click to access the contents of that drive as you would any other.

Select the new icon to access the contents of the network drive.Īs you enter the login details of the network drive you should see a new drive icon appear on your desktop.

Select ‘ Remember this password in my keychain’ to avoid having to enter the login every time.

Enter the username and password to access the resource when prompted.

Select the ‘ +’ icon to add it to your favorites list.

The format will likely be something like ‘smb://NASdrivename/diskorfoldername’ or ‘smb://192.168.1.15/ diskorfoldername’.

In the popup that appears, enter the address of the network drive.

Open Finder, click Go, and select Connect to Server.

Cheap to buy and simple to set up, they are very popular indeed. NAS drives are useful to home users for sharing movies, music, files, or games across multiple computers within the same house, apartment block, dorm, etc. These typically aren’t used in a home setting, considering that they’re typically overkill and not very affordable. It’s a great way to have central storage that multiple people can use.Ī SAN is essentially a more complicated NAS that can have multiple drives available from within the network. Either way, the device attaches to your router via ethernet and makes its drives available to authorized users.

A NAS device can be as simple as an external hard drive connected to your home router or as complicated as a dedicated NAS device with its own hardware and multiple drives. Network drives are usually made up of computers that act as servers to provide storage, generally in the form of a NAS or SAN device. NAS vs SANĪnd that’s where NAS and SAN come into play.

It’s like having your own personal iCloud or Google Drive. This also means that any device connected to your network can access these files as well. This means that you can access the files stored on a network drive any time you’re connected to your network, not just when the device is plugged into your computer. However, rather than plugging directly into your computer, it plugs into your wireless router. A network drive is fundamentally the same as these drives – it has a fixed amount of storage and is used to store files.

Mac network drive access