Specific and Non-specific External Hard Drives

hi,

i have a clamshell that hasnt' arrived yet but i previousily asked a question about external hard drives. my question now is i still have a pc i'd like to use as back up but there are things that i want to store on the external hard drivefrom both the clamshell and the pc. Does anyone know if it matters what kind of external hdd to purchase? my bf says it should say universal but there isn't a specific brand. Any other suggestions maybe something mac specific? Thanks.

Any brand of external drive will do fine. You didn't mention which Mac notebook computer you purchased but keep in mind the latest OS from Apple is Leopard. It comes with a built in backup program called Time Machine.

Time Machine can automatically backup your data to an external hard drive. However the drive must be formatted for HFS+ which is the native Mac OS X file system. The external drive should be at least as large as the internal drive of your Mac, preferably larger.

If you wish to use an external drive for both your Mac and a PC, it's best to format the drive to FAT-32 which will allow reading and writing by both. Mac OS X can read from NTFS but without additional software can not write to it.

I use two external drives, one for backup only and the other for mutual storage. I hope that gives you some idea of what you might need.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Mac computing!

Regards.

thank you for your response. my computer is apple ibook g3 clamshell i believe it's the second generation it originally came with 64mb upgraded to 192 and it has 6gb. my bf says any external at 320 should be enough but im clueless about formatting and FAT32? The clamshell is currently running panther 10.4 i believe. Will i still need to go to tiger? Can i even get to tiger with the amount of gb on the computer?

10.4 is Tiger, 10.3 is Panther.

I think my iBook was running 10.3 before I destroyed the thing and it was fairly happy. Have you got the Graphite then? Don't be too disappointed if it seems a little slow.. it'll be almost a decade old! Might need a new battery as well.

With regards to formatting, buy the external and plug it in to your iBook. Go to Applications/ Utilities/ Disk Utility and you should find all the options for formatting and erasing and whatnot.

So what would the additional software be to write to NTFS?

pwf said:

So what would the additional software be to write to NTFS?

Click to expand...

You can use Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X or follow these directions to use an open-source option.

Just keep in mind that writing and reading to NTFS is significantly slower than to a mac formated drive.

Quick question, if you format a hard drive with FAT-32, would you still be able to run Time Machine on that drive?

No ...