How to Access Other Volumes on Mac
If you've ever plugged in an external drive, partitioned your internal disk, or noticed unfamiliar icons appearing in Finder, you've encountered volumes on macOS. Knowing how to navigate between them is a fundamental skill — and one that becomes increasingly relevant as your storage setup grows more complex.
What Is a Volume on a Mac?
A volume is a formatted, mountable storage unit that macOS treats as a distinct location for files. It's not the same as a physical drive. A single physical drive can contain multiple volumes, and a single volume can span multiple drives in certain configurations.
Common examples of volumes you might encounter:
- Your main macOS startup volume (usually named "Macintosh HD")
- A Data volume — part of macOS's APFS container system, which splits the startup disk into two linked volumes automatically
- External drives — USB, Thunderbolt, or FireWire devices formatted as one or more volumes
- Disk images (.dmg files) that mount as temporary volumes when opened
- Network volumes — shared folders from another Mac, NAS device, or server
- Boot Camp partitions — Windows volumes created alongside macOS on Intel Macs
Understanding which type of volume you're dealing with shapes how you access and interact with it.
How macOS Organizes Volumes With APFS
Since macOS High Sierra, Apple has used APFS (Apple File System) as the default format for SSDs. APFS introduces the concept of containers — a pool of storage shared across multiple volumes on the same physical drive.
This matters practically: when you look at your internal drive in Disk Utility, you'll likely see a container with at least two volumes inside it — Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data. These work together to run your system but appear as a single unified location to you in Finder. You don't need to navigate between them manually under normal use.
Additional APFS volumes can be created within the same container, and each gets its own name and mount point in the filesystem.
Accessing Volumes Through Finder 🖥️
The most straightforward way to browse volumes on a Mac:
1. Sidebar in Finder Open a Finder window and look at the left sidebar under the Locations section. Mounted volumes — including external drives, disk images, and network shares — appear here automatically once connected or mounted.
If you don't see the Locations section:
- Go to Finder → Preferences (or Settings in macOS Ventura and later) → Sidebar
- Check the boxes for "External disks," "CDs, DVDs, and iOS Devices," and "Connected servers"
2. Desktop Icons Finder can also display volume icons directly on your desktop. Enable this under Finder → Preferences/Settings → General, then check the types of drives you want visible.
3. The /Volumes Directory Every mounted volume on macOS lives under the path /Volumes/ in the file system. You can navigate here directly using Finder → Go → Go to Folder (Shift+Command+G), then type /Volumes. This shows every currently mounted volume, including ones that may not appear prominently in the sidebar.
Accessing Volumes via Terminal
For users comfortable with the command line, Terminal gives complete visibility: