Mac External HDD

[brammers]

Hi all,

I know nothing at all about Macs. My girlfriend wants a small, portable external HDD - I'm guessing we'll be going for a 2.5" powered from the USB port rather than anything big with its own power. When browsing for options I keep seeing 'Formatted for Mac' - take a look here:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...40&subcat=1237

Can she just buy a PC one and then format it on her mac when she gets it? She's got a Macbook Air - no idea about OS. I'd just buy a Mac one, but we'll be buying in Zhongguancun in Beijing - they're fine for standard stuff but anything even a little bit specialist is hard to get hold of and gets very expensive.

I'm a fan of the Seagate range, I've got a couple myself. Anything else I should keep a special eye out for, or are the big brands much of a muchness?

Cheers all!

[aidanjt]

Can she just buy a PC one and then format it on her mac when she gets it?

Yes, they all use the USB Mass Storage interface.

[Ommid]

Most companies try to rip you off by selling a mac edition drive that simply has firewire (not useful for the current macbooks) and all you need is the same windows drive with usb.

I recommend a Western Digital Passport

[peterb]

Macs use a different file system (HFS) for their hard drives, however they can read/write to FAT file systems, and I think NTFS (Windows).

If the drive is going to be used exclusively with the Mac, then reformat it to HFS on the Mac. If you are going to share it with a Windows based machine, format it to FAT32.

Some USB powered drives can be unreliable if the USB port cannot supply enough power. The spec allows for 500mA, but some provide less/some drives take a bit more. You can sometimes overcome that with a double ended USB cable - it has two plugs at one end to plug into 2 USB ports (one just supplies extra power) and a single plug at the other for the drive.

[brammers]

Thanks for that. I'd say the drive would be 90% for her personal use with the mac but it would be nice to be able to have windows machines access it - it's a portable one so it could end up being a very large USB stick. What are the disadvantages of using FAT32 formatting on a Mac?

[peterb]

Essentially you lose the access controls (You lose one or two other things as well, but access control is the main one). If you think of HFS as being roughly the equivalent of NTFS, then going to FAT32 on a Mac is equivalent to going to FAT 32 on Windows. It's the lowest common demoninator!

[Peter Parker]

If you only want to read data from HFS (Mac) formatted drives under Windows, you could use this:

http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html

[lodore]

leopard only has read support for NTFS. you can get write drivers such as the one from paragon software. but its just easier to keep the drive as fat32.

[peterb]

As the latest MaC OS is BSD based, you could probably install the NTFS-3g open source drivers, butthat does mean dropping down into the CLI and doing some re-configuring. Not for the faint-hearted! Stick to FAT 32!