If you work in a corporate environment or have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive at home, you have likely connected your Mac to a shared network folder via SMB or AFP. Connecting to these drives is incredibly useful, but macOS sometimes develops an annoying habit of automatically attempting to reconnect to these shared drives every single time you reboot or log into your computer.
If you take your laptop to a coffee shop where that specific network drive is unavailable, macOS will hang for a moment, fail to connect, and throw a frustrating error message on your screen: “There was a problem connecting to the server.”
To stop your Mac from throwing this error, you need to remove the network drive from your automatic startup items.
How to Stop Network Drives from Mounting at Login
Network drives are treated exactly like regular applications when it comes to startup procedures. You can manage them in the System Settings.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top left corner of your screen.
- Select System Settings (or System Preferences on older versions of macOS).
- In the left-hand sidebar, click on General.
- In the right pane, click on Login Items.
(If you are on macOS Monterey or older: Click “Users & Groups,” select your username on the left, and click the “Login Items” tab at the top).
- Look at the list of applications under “Open at Login.” You will likely see the name of your shared network drive or the IP address of your NAS listed here.
- Click on the name of the network drive to highlight it.
- Click the small minus (-) button below the list to remove it.
You can now safely restart your Mac. It will boot up much faster because it is no longer wasting time trying to ping an unreachable server, and you will no longer receive the connection error message. Whenever you actually do need the drive, you can simply reconnect to it manually via the Finder’s “Connect to Server” menu.