Show all connected drives on the Mac desktop

macOS splits desktop volumes into four separate categories, each with its own switch. To see every mounted drive on the desktop — the internal disk, external drives, USB sticks and memory cards, and network shares — you turn on all four in Finder → Settings → General. Here is each one, and the four Terminal keys behind them.

The four checkboxes that cover everything

1. Click the desktop so Finder is active, then choose Finder → Settings from the menu bar.
2. On the General tab, under Show these items on the desktop, tick all four:

• Hard disks — your built-in Macintosh HD and any other internal volumes.
• External disks — USB and Thunderbolt hard drives and portable SSDs.
• CDs, DVDs, and iPods — removable media, including SD cards and USB flash drives.
• Connected servers — mounted network shares over SMB, AFP, or NFS.

Tick all four and the desktop fills in immediately with icons for whatever is currently mounted. There is no "all drives" master switch — these four categories are the complete set, and the desktop shows a volume only when its category is ticked. The behaviour is identical on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

The same four keys in Terminal

Each checkbox maps to one defaults key in com.apple.finder. Set all four to true and restart Finder once at the end:

# Show every category of drive on the desktop
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowHardDrivesOnDesktop -bool true
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop -bool true
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowRemovableMediaOnDesktop -bool true
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowMountedServersOnDesktop -bool true
killall Finder

To reverse it, write false to the same four keys and restart Finder again:

# Undo — clear all four from the desktop
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowHardDrivesOnDesktop -bool false
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop -bool false
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowRemovableMediaOnDesktop -bool false
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowMountedServersOnDesktop -bool false
killall Finder

You can mix and match, too — for example, show internal and external disks but leave servers off — by setting only the keys you want. The single killall Finder at the end applies all the changes at once.

What "all drives" really includes

A few edge cases are worth knowing so the desktop matches what you expect:

• SD cards and USB flash drives are treated as removable media, so they need CDs, DVDs, and iPods ticked, not just External disks. If a flash drive is missing while your portable SSD shows, that is the checkbox to check.
• Network shares only appear once they are actually mounted — connecting with Go → Connect to Server (⌘K) mounts the share, and then the Connected servers icon appears.
• Disk images (mounted .dmg files) also count as removable media and follow that same toggle.

With all four on, a busy Mac can gather a crowd of icons quickly. If the desktop starts to feel cluttered, shrink the icons or tidy their layout rather than turning categories back off — that keeps everything visible without the sprawl.

Keeping a crowded desktop readable

Once every drive is visible, tidy layout matters more than ever. Shrink the icons and set a clean grid — see how to change desktop icon size on Mac — so a full set of drives stays glanceable instead of overwhelming.