Map a network drive on a Mac
If you frequently access a file server from a Mac it’s pretty helpful to map the network drive to your desktop. There’s two ways to do this, one method is just mapped for one time use and will reset after a reboot, and another method is a more permanent route that allows the mapped network drive to always appear and mount on your desktop after system reboots and user logins.
Map a network drive to Mac OS X
This method maps a network drive that will disappear if the network connection drops or if you reboot your Mac:
- From the Mac OS X Finder, hit Command+K to bring up the ‘Connect to Server’ window
- Enter the path to the network drive you want to map, ie: smb://networkcomputer/networkshare and click ‘Connect’
- Enter your login/password and click “OK” to mount the network drive
- The drive will now appear on your desktop and in the Finder window sidebar
Map a network drive to Mac OS X that re-mounts after system reboot
This method allows you to reboot your Mac and have the mapped network drive automatically remount and appear on the desktop, this is more persistent than the above method:
- From the Finder, hit Command+K
- Enter the path to the network drive you want to map, ie: smb://networkcomputer/networkshare and click ‘Connect’
- Enter your login credentials and click “OK”
- The drive is now mounted, but continue on to map for system reboot persistence
- Now enter into System Preferences, from the Apple menu
- Click on ‘Accounts’
- Click on “Login Items”
- Click on the + button to add another login item
- Locate the network drive you previously mounted and click “Add”
- Exit out of System Preferences
Your network drive will now be mapped and automatically remounted when you reboot your Mac.
Make the mapped network drive visible on the Mac desktop
It’s possible that the mounted drive will not appear on the desktop due to a system setting. If you want the mapped drive icon to be visible on the Desktop, be sure to do the following additional steps:
- From the Finder, open Finder Preferences by hitting Command+,
- Click the General tab
- Select the checkbox next to ‘Connected Servers’
- Close Finder Preferences
Selecting the checkbox next to Connected Servers ensures that you’ll see the icon on your Mac Desktop, otherwise it will only be visible in the Finder window sidebars and Open/Save dialogues.
Remount mapped network drive with a click
A great additional step for either method is to create an alias of the mapped network drive. This allows you to reconnect to the share with just a click. Here’s how to do this:
- Right-click on the mapped network drive on the Mac OS desktop
- Select “Make Alias”
Now you can double-click that alias to reconnect to the network drive instantly.
As you may have guessed, shared network volumes are treated differently by the OS than external drives and disk images, which is why this a different technique than what you use to mount an ISO in Mac OS X. You can also access and mount smb shares via the command line which allows for scripting possibilities, if you’re interested in a more technical approach.
Thannks Manish
However, in the System Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items, I click on the mounted drive and attempts to connect to it again and fails. Tried this a couple of time, no workee. It may be something to do with my network here.
You can also mount the drive as usual and then drag it to the dock. When rebooting you’ll no longer be connected to the drive but the icon will still show up in the dock so the drive is still one click away.
Networking on the mac is very bad. Sure you can do all you said, but it is always very slow. The first time you click on one of your shortcuts, it takes a while to mount in the background. On windows it is instant. Why?
Your instructions worked perfectly and now I have mapped drives that stay connected. I chose the reconnect every time I reboot.
This is very convenient.
Hi all,
Mounting a network drive works fine towards my Synology NAS system. The problem I have is that I would like to change the user it connects with. Each time my system starts up (still OS X 10,5,8) it uses UserA where I want it to be UserB. Any idea how to get rid of that???
Cheers,
Ricky
Hi,
i have this working, but in some cases i need to re-boot my nas.
when i re-boot, the connection comes good, but itunes wont re-establish the connection, and im forced to re-add all my media into itunes….
any thoughts?
Thanks so much this is EXACTLY what I was trying to figure out how to do. I wanted to replicate the network drive experience I have at work on Win 7 with network storage appearing as mounted hard drives. I was beginning to think this wasn’t possible on my mac.
Something I have noticed.
Is Mac OS X Lion making viewing your drives more difficult? It seems to me that it requires more trickery to simply view all of your available drives. I just got a new 13″ Macbook Air running Lion and it’s my first experience on Lion from Snow Leopard. It feels like they are trying very hard to obscure the nuts and bolts (finding my hard drive to view it on my new mac was a challenge) of how the Mac OS works from the user. Scares me for hard core Mac users. Simple tasks are likely to become more complex and or buried in system settings.
1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor
4GB memory
128GB flash storage1
Intel HD Graphics 300
reconnecting the network drive works perfectly for me, thanks.
One question still. Every boot the network drive is automatically opened in a window. I want the network drive to be mounted, but I dont want the window to be automatically opened.
How can I change this?