Treat External Drives and SSDs Properly

Keeping your Mac healthy is important, but that doesn’t mean you should overlook its accessories, especially when it comes to your external drives. 

Yanking a drive without ejecting it can cause file system errors. Keeping your external SSDs in hot spaces can shorten their life. 

Luckily, external hard drives and accessories aren’t made of glass, but you should still follow some good practices when using them. Here are a few to keep in mind:

• Before unplugging your external drive, in Finder, click Eject next to the drive.
• If your drive is acting strangely, you can open Disk Utility and run First Aid on external drives as well.
• Don’t leave spinning hard drives in hot or humid rooms.

One of the downsides of the base Mac models — especially with older ones — is the limited storage they come with. So you’ll most likely need to rely on external storage. If that’s the case, it’s best to treat your external drives as part of your Mac and give them the same care to ensure they last as long as possible.