01-28-2009, 02:04 PM

Hi,

If I need to buy an external hard drive for my macbook pro, can I buy the western digital passport drives? (the ones works with windows)? Or I need the one which are Mac specified? (those are more expensive, i think).

Thank you.

01-28-2009, 02:35 PM

You can use the WD Passport or any other drive for that matter. The problem you may run into is that nowadays most large external hard drives are pre-formatted at the factory to NTFS. That means you'll have to use Disk Utility to erase the drive and format as either FAT-32 or HFS + so your Mac can both read and write to it. (OS X can read NTFS but not write to it.)

Of course you can always use something like Paragon NTFS for OS X to read and write to NTFS but it's best to reformat the drive instead.

Regards.

02-01-2009, 01:10 AM

Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X is a great program to have, especially if you are putting data onto a hard drive that isn't yours and that you cannot format.

I would be careful using it, though, as it seems to have trouble if you are transferring large amounts of data at a time (>15GB, for example). In that situation, it will stop the transfer of data and leave you with one or more files/folders that can be moved to the trash but are not able to be deleted from there. I had to re-format a hard drive to solve the problem as "TrashIt" and "Force Delete" failed to empty the trash.

Overall, though, if you can format the new hard drive as soon as you get it, you'll most likely be better off.

02-02-2009, 02:58 PM

I have a new external hard drive. Can you please tell me what should I format the hard drive to so that I can read/write from Mac OS and Windows?

Thank you.

02-02-2009, 06:12 PM

I currently have two WD portable hard drives and never formatted, just used straight from the box. The first is a 320 gig hooked up to my Airport Extreme, accessed by 3 PCs and my MBP. The other is a 500gig WD passport studio for mac (FW800) and it is used only for my MBP. Once again, never formatted either one and had no problems, can read and write to both...

02-02-2009, 07:36 PM

Originally Posted by yinglcs

I have a new external hard drive. Can you please tell me what should I format the hard drive to so that I can read/write from Mac OS and Windows?

Thank you.

You'll need to format it to FAT32. It is possible the drive came formatted that way. You can check the current format in Disk Utility. It will give you info of the existing format at the bottom of the screen.