What are network drives?

All students, faculty, and staff at Saint Mary's College are provided with 10GB of disk space on our network to save their files.

This space is accessible from any networked computer on campus, and is commonly referred to as a personal network drive (or the H: drive on Windows computers). A student can save a paper she is working on in her room to her network drive; go to a computer cluster; access the paper saved on her network drive; and print it from the laser printers. Network drives eliminate the need to carry files around on disks or flash drives. Also, a backup of all network drives is created every night, which makes it a secure place for your important papers and other files. Saint Mary's College strongly recommends that you save a copy of your work to your network drive.

You may also need to connect to shared network drives on campus. Instructions for mounting these additional drives can be found here.

Instructions for computers running macOS versions macOS 12 (Monterey), macOS 13 (Ventura), and macOS 14 (Sonoma):

1. While in the Finder (you know you're in the Finder if you look up at the menu bar and it says Finder next to the Apple Menu - if you're not in the Finder, click on the desktop), go to the Finder menu and select Preferences... or Settings....

2. Click on the General icon.

3. In the area below Show these items on the desktop: check the box next to Connected servers. (You may want to check the boxes for Hard disks, External disks, and CDs, DVD, and iPods, too.)

4. Close the Finder Preferences window.

5. While in the Finder, go to the Go menu and select Connect to Server....

6. Next to Server Address: type in smb://username@fs1.saintmarys.edu/username (using your Saint Mary's user name) and click Connect.


7. You will be prompted for a username and password to connect to the server. Type in your user name and your password and then click Connect. (This is your Saint Mary's username and the password you use to check your Saint Mary's e-mail.)


8. The network drive's icon will appear on your desktop. A window will open to display the contents of your network drive.

9. To easily remount a network drive:

   1. Select the drive by clicking on its icon once to highlight it.

   2. Click down once on the icon of the drive and drag it to the right side of the dock at the bottom of the screen. You should see icons in the dock moving around to make room for the new icon to appear.

   3. Let go of the mouse button to "drop" the icon in the dock.

   4. When you shut down or log out of your computer, it will disconnect from any mounted network drives. To reconnect to your network drive when you turn your Mac back on, click once on the icon in the dock of your network drive. You will then be prompted for your Saint Mary's login and password and the drive will mount.