Your new enclosure is ready to go. All that’s left to do is to make the connection to your Mac.
Making Connections
- Attach power to the enclosure. Most enclosures have a power on/off switch. Make sure the switch is set to off, then plug the included power cord or power adapter into the enclosure.
- Connect the data cable to your Mac. Using the external interface of your choice, connect the appropriate data cable (FireWire or USB) to the enclosure and then to your Mac.
- Switch the enclosure’s power on. If the enclosure has a power on light, it should be lit. After a few seconds (anywhere from 5 to 30), your Mac should recognize that an external hard drive has been connected.
That’s it! You’re ready to use the external hard drive you built with your Mac, and enjoy all that extra storage space.
A few words of advice about using external enclosures. Before unplugging the enclosure from your Mac, or turning off the enclosure’s power, you should first unmount the drive. To do this, either select the drive from the desktop and drag it to the Trash, or click the little eject icon next to the drive’s name in a Finder window. Once the external drive is no longer visible on the desktop or in a Finder window, you can safely turn its power off. If you prefer, you can also just shut down your Mac. The shutdown process automatically unmounts all drives. Once your Mac has shut down, you can turn off the external drive.
