Hide your Hard Drives from the Desktop

In this video, I will show you how you can remove your hard drives from your Desktop. When you’re looking at your Mac desktop, by default, you’re going to see your Macintosh HD as well as any external hard drives. Well, we can easily hide these hard drives. Let’s see how we hide our hard drives on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, if we look in the upper right-hand corner, you’re going to see I do not have any hard drives showing. When you first boot up a Mac, it’s going to show you your Macintosh, HD, your hard drive in most cases. How did I hide my hard drive? I also have a couple of external drives. I’m going to open up a new Finder window. If we look over on the side here, I have some external hard drives. So why are they not showing over here on my Desktop? Well, that’s because I have them hidden. I like to keep a nice clean desktop. If I need to access any of my external hard drives, they just go over to the sidebar in a Finder window. And I very rarely need to access my Macintosh HD because everything is in Dan’s Tutorials. Everything’s in my account folder. I don’t need to get outside of this account folder. So I don’t need to have Macintosh HD on my Desktop.

To hide these different items, these external hard drives, and internal hard drives, all we have to do is just go to our Finder Preferences. So I go up under Finder in the menu bar, and then we go over to Preferences. From here, we have a new window that opens up, and we go over to General. Under General, you’re going to see an option for Show these items on the Desktop, and underneath that, we can select what we want to show. You’re going to see that I have hard disks and external disks deselected. So now, when I select my hard disks, you’re going to see over on the right, I have my hard disks. These are my internal hard drives. If I were to select external disks here, you’re also going to see my external drives.

So if you want to hide all of these different drives, all you have to do is just go over to your Finder preferences, go under General, and then select what you want to hide. So I’m going to turn these back off.

So that’s how we can hide our hard drives, internal hard drives, and external hard drives on the Mac. Again, we just go up to our Finder Preferences, we go under General, and then we just select what we want to hide or de-select what we want to hide.

So that’s how we hide our hard drives from our Desktop on the Mac.