MacBook Air (13-inch, 2017) USB Drives
My MacBook Air stopped reading my USB thumb drive. I'm looking for solutions to the issue.
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15
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Reboot the laptop.
Try an SMC reset and PRAM reset.
Launch Disk Utility and click on "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. Do you see the USB stick in Disk Utility now?
You can also look under the "USB" devices on the left pane of the System Profiler which can be accessed by Option-clicking the Apple menu and selecting the first item. You will need to click on each USB item in the right pane to see if the USB stick's hardware is listed (it may not show any volumes).
Try both USB ports.
Are you connecting the USB stick directly to the laptop's USB ports?
Assuming the USB ports are working, then most likely you have a bad USB stick. Try the USB stick in another computer. The quality of USB sticks is extremely poor even when using a name brand. Sometimes macOS can have trouble reading USB sticks as well if they were formatted (aka "erased") on another computer (even if it was another Mac).