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The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
I recently purchased a new MacBook Air and when trying to connect my Samsung portable SSD I get a pop-up notification. Its basically saying that it can’t be read. why is this? Also I want to keep all my data on the drive.
MacBook Air
Drives formatted in the old HFS (not HFS+ journaled) format are no longer readable by macOS Sonoma or later. You will need a Mac with an older operating system on it and a new drive formatted with HFS+, FAT32, exFAT, or APFS (macOS Mojave or later) so that you can mount the HFS drive and transfer its contents to a format still readable by Sonoma or later.
Was this external drive used on an older Mac? Or a PC?
Was the external drive encrypted? Is so by what app?
Were you using the Samsung proprietary software to manage that drive?
Disconnect all other external devices (especially drives), but connect the external Samsung SSD. Then run the following command from the Terminal app so we can the drive layout of that external drive (if other drives are attached, it just confuses things):
diskutil list external
Edit: If this was used on an older Mac, what was the OS used on that older Mac which could access that drive?
What does the notification say? Do you know how the drive is formatted? For some time, Macs have been able to read (but not write to) NTFS-formatted drives, which is how most Windows drives are formatted.
Yes, formatting the drive would erase all data on it. It might help if you’re able to post a screenshot of the notification.
I believe I formatted the drive on my previous computer (a macbook pro). If i were to format again wouldn't my files be deleted?
"the disk you attached was not readable by this computer"
New mac. old SSD. cant connect?
