I’ve been that person who leaves external drives constantly mounted, wondering why my Mac takes forever to wake up and why my HDDs keep spinning up randomly. After one too many slowdowns and the annoying whirr of drives spinning for no reason, I found MountMate - a tiny menu bar utility that solved a problem I didn’t fully realize I had.
MountMate sits quietly in your menu bar, showing you exactly which external drives are connected and their mount status. Click the icon, and you get a clean list of all your drives with their available space. A single click mounts or unmounts any drive. No Terminal commands, no digging through Disk Utility, just instant control over your external storage.
What really sold me on MountMate was understanding why the developer created it. They built it to solve their own workflow issues - preventing unnecessary drive spin-ups and system slowdowns caused by mounted drives that weren’t actively being used. It’s that scratching-your-own-itch philosophy that often produces the most thoughtful software.
After trying MountMate on my M2 Mac mini with a mix of external SSDs and spinning drives for several weeks, the difference is immediately noticeable. My backup drives stay quiet until I actually need them. System wake-up is snappier. No more random beach balls when macOS decides to check on a sleeping drive.
The app is refreshingly focused. It does drive mounting and unmounting, shows free space, and that’s it. No feature creep, no subscription nags, no unnecessary complexity. The entire app is written in Swift using native macOS APIs, so it feels right at home on the system. No Electron bloat here - just a lightweight utility that does exactly what it promises.
Installation is straightforward - you can use Homebrew (brew install --cask mountmate) or grab the DMG from GitHub. The app is completely free and open source under the GPL license. Version 1.6 dropped in June 2025 with the latest improvements.
One detail I appreciate: MountMate runs entirely offline. It doesn’t track anything, doesn’t access your files, just manages drive mounting through standard system calls. In an era of apps that want to phone home for everything, this privacy-focused approach is refreshing.
Performance impact is essentially zero. The app uses minimal memory and CPU, exactly what you’d expect from a native Swift application with such a focused purpose. It launches instantly and responds immediately to clicks.
For anyone juggling multiple external drives, especially mechanical HDDs that you don’t want constantly spinning, MountMate is a simple solution to a real problem. It’s particularly valuable if you’re using Time Machine drives, photo archives, or backup drives that don’t need to be mounted 24/7.
Sometimes the best menu bar apps are the ones that do one thing exceptionally well. MountMate manages external drives with the kind of simplicity and reliability that makes you wonder why this isn’t built into macOS itself.
