How to Show All Drive Devices in Disk Utility for MacOS

You can adjust a setting in Disk Utility for Mac to see all device disks and drives connected to a Mac. This will make it so that you can view the containing drive (like “Apple SSD”) rather than simply the partition or volume that is accessible by the user facing part of the file system (like “Macintosh HD”).

How to Show All Drive Devices in Disk Utility on Mac

1. Open Disk Utility on the Mac if you have not done so already
2. Click on “View” in the toolbar



3. Choose “Show All Devices”



4. See the list of disk devices in the sidebar of Disk Utility

As mentioned a moment ago, this will allow you to see the parent drive containing whatever partitions or volumes that are accessed by the user. For example if you have a drive with a hardware name like “SAMSUNG SSD 1TB” that contains two APFS volumes called “Macintosh HD” and “Backup” then you would see all of that drive information hierarchically in Disk Utility, rather than simply the two named APFS volumes.

You can also access the different disk and volume views from the Disk Utility “View” menu.

Note this is only applicable to the newest versions of Disk Utility for the latest versions of MacOS. Earlier versions of Disk Utility in earlier Mac OS X releases were more full featured and displayed extended disk data immediately.

Disk Utility on the Mac will still not show some other volumes and partitions even with his setting enabled, for example the Recovery partition and EFI partitions will not be displayed through Disk Utility on the Mac in modern versions (and there is no longer a known Disk Utility Debug menu for advanced users to access either). Thus, if you’re an advanced user and wish to see all of those partitions you’d need to use the command line to list all drives, mounted drives, and partitions as shown here. You can also mount and unmount drives from the Mac command line and explore many other powerful options for the command line diskutil tool.