external hard drives "for mac"

what's the difference between a regular external hard drive and the ones i see advertised as "formatted for mac os x" ?

cant you just plug-and-play with any working external hard drive? i mean you dont have to buy a specific flash drive "formatted for mac os x" hard drive space is hard drive space, eh?

If the hdd is not mac formatted, it is in NTFS which is a windows format which you can only read not write. You can format it though time machine when you first plug it in however, if you do this it will wipe all data from it.

yamawho said:

If the hdd is not mac formatted, it is in NTFS which is a windows format which you can only read not write. You can format it though time machine when you first plug it in however, if you do this it will wipe all data from it.

Click to expand...

right so it seems to me like i can save myself a decent little chunk of change by just buying an external that doesnt come with a cool macintosh logo on it and simply formatting it out-of-the-box when i first hook her up.


-buy it
-formatt it
-use it til it breaks and laugh at all the people who got suckered in by the marketing tricks
-???
-profit

y0itsj0hn said:

right so it seems to me like i can save myself a decent little chunk of change by just buying an external that doesnt come with a cool macintosh logo on it

Click to expand...

Yes, I used a 500GB hdd and did this last week on mine.

yamawho said:

Yes, I used a 500GB hdd and did this last week on mine.

Click to expand...

how do you reformatt with time machine, i thought all that did was back up files

When you first plus the external in it asks you if you want to use it with time machine. Then you will be given these options.

BTW I used the Apple stickers that came with my son's iPod and put those on my external hdd

use ' Diskutility ' to partition and format your external disk.

Diskutility.app can be found in your applications/utility folder.

Be carefull .... you wouldn't want to format your internal disk

Cheers ... McBie

McBie said:

use ' Diskutility ' to partition and format your external disk.

Diskutility.app can be found in your applications/utility folder.

Be carefull .... you wouldn't want to format your internal disk

Cheers ... McBie

Click to expand...

Thats why I suggested the method thru time machine ...