An alias to the network hard drive is sitting in the Dock, so it’s just one click away for easy access.

I have a mixed network of Macs and PCs, along with a network hard drive that all the computers connect to. On the PC, the network drive is mapped to a drive letter and is always accessible under My Computer. On the Mac, I can navigate to the drive using the Finder, but each time I turn on the Mac, I need to find the drive again. Is there a way that I can map the drive and reconnect at login without having to go through this process every time?

One of our favorite ways of doing this is to simply drag the mounted network drive (the globe icon on your desktop) into the right-hand side of your Dock, which is not only used for minimized documents but also for your favorite documents, folders, and volumes. Once you do that, you’re just one click away from accessing that network drive in the future. And if you tell Mac OS X to remember your password in the Keychain, you won’t even be prompted for the password.

There are other ways of doing this as well. You can add the network hard drive to your list of Login Items in the System Preferences > Accounts, so it always opens up at login. And if you connect to your drive through the Advanced > Connect To Server dialog in the Finder, you can click the plus sign to add your server to your list of favorites. And yet another way: If you browse your local network using the Network icon in the Finder, you can drag and drop any of the listed servers into the sidebar in the Finder.