How do i use my book live with wire connection?

I purchased a 2TB My Book Live today. I’d like to move files onto the drive while wired to avoid how long I could spend moving hundreds of GBs. I connected the drive directly to my Macbook Pro using the ethernet port. The MBL didn’t mount. It showed up again when i connected wirelessly. Could someone tell me how I could go about being able to use the MBL while connected directly? I’m surprised there’s no USB port.

Since the MBL is a wired drive, and the default is that it obtains an IP address via DHCP,  you’ll need to affix a static IP address to the MBL.   Easy enough to do while connected to it wirelessly  via Settings/Network/Lan Configuration. I’d set it to an IP outside of your routers DHCP range personally, but a lot of routers will grab an entire /24 netmask so that may or may not be above your skill level as closing that range requires a reconfig of the router also.  Could also set it to an IP hight in the subnet range as most homes will rarely use a # above about 30-40 or so. 

so, if you’re 192.168.1.30/24 on the MBL and 192.168.1.22/24 on the computer set the MBL to like 192.168.1.250 as a static and you’ll probably never collide with the DHCP scope. /24 equates to a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 by the way. 

Can’t use .1 as that’s likely your gateway address and .255 will be a broadcast address so you shouldn’t pick them. 

Once you set the static IP you just have to make sure your laptop/desktop ethernet port is on the same subnet and you should be able to access the MBL via IP address.  Again, you’ll have to have a static IP on your machine, as it won’t be connected to the router to get an IP via DHCP. 

As an alternative, do you have ethernet ports on your router? Hook the machine and the MBL each to a router port and go to town. Router should supply DHCP IP’s to it’s local ports and you benefit from a wired connection with little technical knowledge required. 

If that’s totally confusing just go to a CMD prompt  on a windows machine (running as an admin) and type ipconfig /all and paste the results here and I’ll (or some other bright folks here) can post some suggestions for IP usage in more detail. 

Hope that helps. Basic problem is that while you can connect MBL and computer directly to exch other they need an IP to work, and without that there’s no communication