Known bad adapters or external hubs

When connecting external storage fails, often the issue is not with macOS or NTFS for Mac

Every so often we get help requests from our customers who claim their external disk will not mount properly, or disconnects intermittently. After troubleshooting it is sometimes revealed that the problem is caused by a faulty or incompatible adapter.

The easiest way to rule out an issue like this is to connect the storage device directly to the port on your Mac or to try another kind of adapter. If the problem persists, the hub or adapter is not the cause.

What if my Mac doesn't have the kind of port that the device requires and I need an adapter to use it?

It is always possible that in order to use a device at all, it needs to be connected using some kind of adapter because your Mac is not equipped with the right kind of connector. In this case it is important to ensure a quality adapter or hub is used. Lower spec adapters can often suffer from problems with power delivery or routing all the information, especially if they allow more than one device to be connected at the same time.

List of known problematic devices

We would like to emphasize that this is not an exhaustive list! There are certainly many more devices that might have problems that we don't know about. The list is comprised of ones that have come to our attention via our customers. It is also possible some of the devices on this list don't always have issues, but do have them with the particular hardware the customer who reported the issue was using.