The external hard drive itself, under normal circumstances, should be detected by your operating system, without the need of drivers, software, or firmware updates.

While it is possible that your external hard drive may have come with bundled software that may be incompatible with newer operating systems, this is typically just ‘back up’ software, and the drive is not dependent on that software to function. There are several reasons why an external hard drive may not be accessible or detected when you connect it to your computer.