I know how to change the icon that shows on the Desktop for an external hard drive (just did it using the Get Info window), and have done it many times before. But now with an external SSD, the copy/paste method used for external hard drives to change the Desktop icon produces no change. Is this a characteristic of SSDs or is something else going on. Yes, I have privileges for the SSD.

Sorry for forgetting about this.

I was just able to change my external SSD's desktop icon using the traditional Get Info > copy & paste method.

Dunno what's up on your end.

Addendum: macOS 10.15.7

I am in the same OS as you indicated. I'll pursue into this again. Thanks.

The bottom line is that some forum postings elsewhere claim there is a bug in Catalina and Big Sur that may prevent the icon from changing, but not always. Further research revealed that the desired image may need to be of the format .png or .ico, both of which I have tried, but the new Desktop icon will not "stick". This is even after the green "+" sign appears after dragging the image onto the Get Info window or after attempting to copy and paste it in this window. Alas.

My successful experiment was conducted using a .tiff image.

I just tried again with a .png, and the icon changed, but not to the image I used, rather it was a generic .png icon.

Just tried a .tif. Same unsuccessful result. Thanks, though.

I use icons (copy / paste Info for external drives, including SSDs) that are .icns created (actually, conversions of jpegs or .png files) by an app called Image2Icon (on the Mac App Store or you can go here). ...Image2Icon allows you to save the created icon in several formats; so, it's very flexible.

Thanks for the suggestion, but for the $10 fee to export the image as a .icns I will look to software that I have that was able to do the same thing.

Do a GetInfo on the volume and see. what your privileges are

Yes, been there, done that. I have read/write privileges.

The only other "oddity" is that this SSD is used as a Carbon Copy Clone.

As I previously posted, this is a problem others have had with Catalina and Monterey OS's.