Disk management

Cards, shuttles, RAIDs — the whole cart is disks, and IngestDeck manages them without a Disk Utility detour. Every mounted volume is live state: roles, names, capacities, formats and speed scores update across the entire app the instant anything changes.

Roles: the misdrop killer

Every disk carries a remembered role — Source, Destination, or unassigned — persisted per disk with an identity that survives remounts, renames and reboots.

• Role badges on disk rows: up-arrow = Source, down-arrow = Destination.
• Role-locked drops: a Source disk cannot be dropped into a destination slot, and vice versa — in Simple's columns, on Advanced node cards, everywhere. Wrong-way drops bounce with a toast naming the reason. Unassigned disks go either way.
• Why it matters: the classic on-set disaster — a camera card picked as a copy target — is structurally impossible once roles are set. Set them the first time a disk appears and forget.

The disk detail panel

Hover a disk row and use the ••• button (or right-click) to open the detail panel — the one place for everything about that volume: name, mount path, media class (SSD / HDD / network), capacity and used space, filesystem, plus the sections below.

Rename

Type a new name and IngestDeck renames the volume. Where macOS supports renaming that filesystem (and the app has Full Disk Access), it's a true volume rename visible in the Finder. On volumes that don't support renaming, IngestDeck keeps a display-name override instead — the app shows your name; the volume keeps its own.

Identify: pulse the light

Five identical orange shuttles on the cart, one of them is today's. Identify makes the physical disk's activity light blink in a steady rhythm by issuing tiny cache-bypassed reads. The row shows a pulsing indicator; press Stop identifying when found. Available for removable physical volumes (not the boot volume or network shares), and unavailable while that disk is busy in a run.

Format

Format straight from the app to APFS, exFAT or HFS+ (what a target can format to depends on the media — the panel offers what's valid). The flow is deliberately ceremonious, because it's the one destructive act in the whole app:

1. Pick the filesystem and name

   Volume names are normalized to the filesystem's rules automatically (exFAT's length limits, for example).

2. Approve the helper — first time only

   Formatting runs through a signed privileged helper. macOS asks once to allow it in System Settings ▸ General ▸ Login Items; the panel walks you there.

3. Confirm the erase

   A confirmation names the disk and warns about data loss. The disk's identity is re-checked at the moment of format — a swapped disk can't be erased by mistake.

• Scope: local, writable external media only — no whole-disk erases of internal drives, no network volumes. A read-only-mounted NTFS disk on writable hardware can be reformatted.
• Entitlement-gated: formatting requires an active subscription/license — the helper itself validates it.
• No progress bar: a format shows a busy state until the system reports done (they're quick).

Speed test & smart order

Test speed runs a time-boxed benchmark (roughly 5–13 seconds) and stores the disk's speed score. That score powers Smart order on multi-destination Copy nodes: destinations write fastest-first, so the slow archive HDD never holds up the fast working SSD. When Smart order is on and a destination has no score yet, the Copy node's detail offers Run benchmark right there — it opens the disk detail, runs the test, and feeds the score back automatically.

Eject

Eject from the row's hover button, the context menu, the completion dialog after a Simple job — or structurally, with an Eject node that releases a disk only after all its work in the graph is verified done.

Full Disk Access

macOS gates deep disk access behind Full Disk Access. On first launch (after sign-in) IngestDeck shows a status panel explaining the grant and deep-links to the right pane in System Settings; it detects the grant automatically the moment you flip the switch (a Check again button is there too). Copying works without it in many cases, but FDA is what makes every corner of every card readable and volume renames possible — grant it once and forget it.

Real-world disk habits

• New production, new cart: plug everything in once, set roles (cards → Source, RAID + shuttles → Destination), rename shuttles to their label-maker names, benchmark the destinations. Ten minutes, and every later drop is gated and every Smart-order copy is optimal.
• The returned card: a card comes back from another unit — before reuse, run a source audit against its ASC-MHL, then format it from the detail panel, role already remembered.
• Which shuttle is which: courier waiting, five identical disks — Identify, watch for the blink, hand it over.