If you connect a lot of drives to your Mac—or connect a particular external hard drive to a lot of unlike Macs—it can all be a lot to go along rail of. Changing the icon for your drives is a quick way to visually tell them apart.

RELATED: How to Change Drive Icons in Windows

The process is similar to changing binder and awarding icons, but it's different in a few key ways. For one matter, the change carries over from one Mac to another, which is cracking if there'southward an external bulldoze you lot regularly connect to different Macs. In fact, custom icons volition even show up the bootloader. And so if you've installed Windows with Boot Military camp or created a USB installer for macOS, a custom icon can arrive easier to spot which bulldoze you lot desire.

Where to Find Difficult Drive Icons for macOS

Beginning, you'll want to find a few custom icons to effort out. Wait for icons that are square, ideally 512 past 512 pixels (or higher), and in Apple's .icns format. You might also find icons in PNG format you tin catechumen to ICNS using an online converter like iConvert Icons. Hither's a quick roundup of icons I've plant:

  • Some external hard bulldoze manufacturers may offer icons to match the drives they sell. Both Lacie and Akitio offer icon packs, for example. Doing and then certainly makes it easier to keep track of which drive is which.
  • This forum mail has a collection of icons for diverse solid state drives, including the Intel icon I used in the images above. It's perfect if you've added your own solid state drive to an older Mac, and want to bear witness that fact off a little.
  • DeviantArt has a bunch of hard drive icons, just yous'll accept to exercise some digging. I used this one for my second drive in the starting time screenshot of this article.
  • IconArchive is another site worth checking out, offering .icns files for basically all of their icons.

Beyond this, I suggest doing some Googling. If at that place'south a specific drive you'd similar an icon for, searching for the model with followed by "icns download" or "png" will sometimes requite you desire y'all want, bold someone else took the fourth dimension to make you lot an icon. Good luck!

Pace One: Re-create Your Icon File

If you've downloaded a few icons you'd similar to effort out, lets get started! Open the folder where you lot've stored your icons.

Copy the icon you'd like to use for your drive by right-clicking the icon and then clicking "Copy."

Now we're ready to paste the icon onto our bulldoze.

Pace 2: Paste Your Icon File

Side by side, make sure the bulldoze you desire to give a custom icon is continued to your computer. Then, open the Finder and click your computer under "Devices." You'll see all of your continued drives.

Right-click the drive you'd like to give a custom icon, so click "Go Info."

This volition bring upwards the information screen for your hard drive.

If you click the icon at the height of this window, you lot volition see a blue highlight, indicating that the icon has been selected.

Once you encounter this, press Command+5 on your keyboard to paste your icon. (If nothing happens, the icon you copied may not be compatible, just you tin can sometimes work effectually this by opening the icon file in Preview, selecting the entire sail, and copying that.)

Yous might exist asked for your password.

Enter information technology, and the change will have place.

Repeat this procedure for any other drives y'all'd like to customize.

To undo your change, open Become Info for the drive once again, then select the icon and hit the Delete key. The icon will revert to the default.

In these screenshots I applied custom icons to internal drives, simply information technology also works for external hard drives, including USB wink drives. Even amend: in my tests, changing an icon on one Mac will change information technology on every Mac, and then yous'll ever exist able to apace find your drive if y'all're using another estimator.

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