Roofull drive advertised as Mac Compatible didn't work after much troubleshooting. Tried all combinations of power sources, etc. USB A and/or USB C.
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MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15
An important distinction is that an empty drive is NEVER shown on the desktop -- only Mounted Volumes are shown.
A VERY important issue with Bus-powered external drives is that many require a whopping 900 milliAmps, where the standard supplied bus Power is 500 milliAmps.
Required and available power can be shown in this display:
menu > about this Mac > (System report) > Hardware > USB
...
Most any available drive should work just fine. I have to ask you if you tried inserting some different disks (which are properly formatted for a Mac)? Doing so helps to confirm that the problem is the drive and not the disk that was used. When a disk is inserted the drive/disk should then show up on the desktop. Is that not happening? If not, then you may simply have a defective unit and you need to work the vendor to resolve the issue or replace the unit.
Thank you kindly for your replies. I did try with various disks but the drive simply lit up and would spin for a bit after a window quickly flashed by. Unable to find what message was being display as it was just for a small fraction of a second. I was able to continue with research and have uncovered what I believe was the problem:
1) USB devices seem not to mount when multiple users are logged into the MBP. Once only my "main" account is logged in, I was able to mound the CD/DVD drive. So far I've only test the ability to successful read from the Roofull drive.
2) Same issue was seen when trying to mount an SD Card for my camera which had previously worked successfully on the same MBP (Sonoma 14.4.1). This is what clued me in. I ran across a post indicating that USB mounting becomes a problem with multiple users logged into the same Mac. I'll see if I can find that reference.
Thanks again!
It’s likely not getting enough power to run. I’d opt to buy one with AC power and USB C.
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Which CD/DVD drive is compatible with MacBook Pro
