How to Show the Hard Drive Icon on Mac Desktop

Macs haven't shown Macintosh HD on the desktop by default in years — the icon didn't disappear from your Mac specifically, it's just off out of the box. Four checkboxes in Finder's settings bring back the internal disk, external drives, discs, and network servers. Here's where they are, plus the two features that hide desktop icons even when the boxes are ticked.

Show drives on the desktop

1. Click the desktop (or any Finder window) so Finder is the active app.
2. Choose Finder → Settings… in the menu bar, or press Cmd + ,.
3. In the General tab, find Show these items on the desktop.
4. Tick Hard disks — Macintosh HD appears at the top right of the desktop instantly.

The other three checkboxes cover the rest of the family: External disks (USB drives and SSDs), CDs, DVDs, and iPods, and Connected servers (mounted network shares). Most people's sweet spot is external disks and servers on — so plugging something in gives visible, ejectable feedback — and the internal disk off, since it's always there anyway. All four work identically on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia, and unticking a box is the undo.

The Terminal version

The same switches exist as real Finder preferences, handy for setup scripts:

# show internal and external drives on the desktop
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowHardDrivesOnDesktop -bool true
defaults write com.apple.finder ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop -bool true
killall Finder

# undo: remove the overrides, restoring the defaults
defaults delete com.apple.finder ShowHardDrivesOnDesktop
defaults delete com.apple.finder ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop
killall Finder

The killall Finder restarts Finder so the change shows up; it respawns by itself in a second.

Don't forget the sidebar

If the real goal is "get to my drive quickly," the Finder sidebar is often better than the desktop: in the same settings window, open the Sidebar tab and tick Hard disks and External disks under Locations. Drives then appear in every Finder window and every open/save dialog — no trip to the desktop needed.

Boxes ticked but icons still missing?

Two macOS features hide desktop icons regardless of Finder's checkboxes:

• Stage Manager hides desktop items by default. Either turn Stage Manager off, or open System Settings → Desktop & Dock and, under Desktop & Stage Manager, make sure Show Items → On Desktop is checked.
• On Sonoma and Sequoia, clicking the wallpaper pushes windows aside to reveal the desktop — if your icons appear only when you click the wallpaper, that's this feature doing its job, not icons missing. The related setting is Desktop & Dock → Click wallpaper to reveal desktop.

And if a specific external drive won't show anywhere, check it's actually mounted: open Disk Utility and look for it in the list — an unmounted disk has no icon to show.

Make the icons comfortable

Once the drives are visible, the desktop's own view options control how they look. Click the desktop and press Cmd + J: the panel lets you set icon size, grid spacing, text size, and whether labels sit beside or below the icon — plus Sort By if you want macOS to keep everything snapped to a grid automatically. Drive icons behave like any other desktop item, so you can drag them anywhere; the top-right column is just where new volumes land by convention. And dragging a drive icon to the Trash doesn't delete anything — the Trash turns into an eject symbol, which is the oldest way to unmount a disk on the Mac.