External hard drive becomes internal... What?

Hey all.

2012 Mac mini, i5 2.5GHz, 16GB Ram, OWC SSD, OS 10.11.3.

I decided to dig into some of my external hard drive usb 2/3 connections changes and stuff. I solved a previous issue pertaining to USB hubs and stuff. And now i have a new arrival... everything functions just fine, but I have an external hard drive that functions as my Media storage drive. OS X sees it as an internal drive.

Can anyone make sense of it? My assumption is it's because I'm using it attached to iTunes, so the system doesn't want it to be able to be ejected at will or something.

Thanks!

pinto79 said:

OS X sees it as an internal drive.

Can anyone make sense of it?

Click to expand...

If this external drive has an OS installed on it…it's possible the Mini booted from the external drive. Or…you got so many darn drives & partitions connected…that you're getting confused which drives are internal & external!

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

If this external drive has an OS installed on it…it's possible the Mini booted from the external drive. Or…you got so many darn drives & partitions connected…that you're getting confused which drives are internal & external!

- Nick

Click to expand...

Since neither of those are the case... anyone else have any ideas?

pinto79 said:

Since neither of those are the case... anyone else have any ideas?

Click to expand...

Maybe you could better explain what this setup looks like…so we can have a better mental picture of things?

Looking at image #1 above…it looks like this Mac-Mini has 3 internal drives & 2 external drives attached. What we don't know is:

- How many actual/physical internal & external drives are attached/installed internally?
- What's the partition setup like on each drive?
- Which drives/partitions have a bootable OS on it?

I took a guess (in my earlier response) at what was up without any of this info…and obviously my guess wasn't correct. Maybe with more info…someone else or myself may come up with a better explanation.

- Nick

I can do that.

The mini has 2 drives that dwell within it's casing, as shown above, they are the OWC SSD and the original 500GB hard drive (Macintosh SSD and Macintosh HD respectively.) The OS (10.11.3) is contained only on the SSD.

I am also using 3 external hard drives. They are labeled Recording 2TB, Media 3TB and Time Machine. Time Machine is connected via FW800 and is used for backups. Recording 2TB is connected to a USB 3.0 hub and detects and runs without issue. Media 3TB is external and connected via USB 3.0 to the same hub as Recording, but as is noted on the first image I attached, it is seen as 3TB USB Internal Physical Volume OS X Extended. On the desktop it is shown with the same icon as the internal drives rather than how an external generally shown. It is used for media storage and is assigned to iTunes. In finder, it doesn't have an eject symbol next to it either.

It works fine as is and I have no issues with accessing it or my data, and iTunes is fine with it, I'm just confused as to why that would happen.