02-20-2011, 09:40 PM

Looking to buy a 2TB ext HD for my new iMac. Which has a 2TB drive.

I've seen some WD 2TB drives for around $140 CAD on Amazon.ca: Online shopping for Canadians - books, electronics, music, DVDs, software, video games & more but they usually say you need to reformat the drives to support Mac OS X 10.6. Is it as straight forward as I think? Anything I should be aware of?

The "for Mac" hard drives, especially the WD 2TB model is double the cost. At almost $290 CAD. Just because it comes pre-formatted for the Mac.

Thought I would save some money.

02-21-2011, 02:43 AM

Formatting the 2 TB drive is easy. It's probably pre-formatted to NTFS from the factory but you can change that to HFS+ by erasing it with Disk Utility and reformatting. Assuming of course that's the format you want.

02-21-2011, 05:51 AM

Formatting an external hard drive for the Macintosh is easy, but there are a number of steps that it is best not to skip. A nice article on this here:

Formatting your hard drive for use with Carbon Copy Cloner / General Overview of the Features of CCC / FAQs - Bombich Software Support

While it used to be that you could confidently purchase any external hard drive, no matter which platform the box said that it was for, and reformat it for the Macintosh, that isn't the case anymore, especially with respect to Seagate hard drives. You may want to read this thread:

Seagate FreeAgent Desk External Drive on Mac - macosx.com

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
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02-21-2011, 10:04 AM

Thanks guys.

What do you think about the Seagate GoFlex drives that are supposed to be able to be used "interchangably with both PC and Mac computers". Read some ads that said you can hook up a PC and a Mac to the same drive simultaneously. Nice if this works as said.

How do they do this? Does it come with two partitions? HPS+ for the Mac users and...

SEAGATE FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 2 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive STAC2000100 (Black) : Storage, Drives & Media | Dell Canada

This drive is only $40.00 more than a WD that can be used with a Mac but must be reformatted. Might go with this one. Save me the effort and the possible aggravation if the WD drive ends up not working with the Mac OS 10.6. Though, if they say it will...

02-21-2011, 02:44 PM

I would not use that drive. First, it's out of stock.... and second it uses encryption which can result in a loss of all your data should something go wrong. (You can probably use it without the encryption though.) I'm assuming the drive is formatted to FAT-32 if it can be used by both a Mac and PC.

However, any external hard drive can be made interchangeable between a Mac and PC by using a common format or special drivers. FAT-32 is a common format between the Mac and a PC but it's limited to a max single file size of around 4 GB. Which can be a disadvantage if you have large video files to store.

If you format an external drive to HFS+ or NTFS, special drivers would be needed so that it could be used by both a Mac and PC to read\write.

02-21-2011, 04:19 PM

Ok thanks chscag. Guess I'll stick with one of the WD My Book series. I have one of those now. It's just a 250GB model. Bought it as a backup for my MBP (which has a 250GB drive).

02-21-2011, 05:47 PM

I've been very impressed with the elements series - roughly £80 on amazon for 2Tb. So much so we bought 4 to hold everything for plex!

We have only had them a few months though, but they're silent, and don't run very hot.

02-21-2011, 08:19 PM

I ordered a WD My Book for Mac 2TB for $170.00 CAD. Not a bad deal.

NCIX.com - Buy Western Digital WD My Book for Mac 2TB External Hard Drive USB with Backup Software - WDBAAG0020HCH-NESN In Canada.