Can I use this seagate drive with a Mac

I have a G4 running 10.5.8. I want to know if it is possible to use a Seagate 1 Terabyte external drive with a Macintosh?

Stopped in Staples today and saw a good deal on a 1 TB drive, so I picked it up with the understanding I can return it.

I have no past experience buying external drives. So I am looking for help.

The drive has very little info on it, its only marked as a Seagate Expansion external drive. It uses a USB 2.0 for connection. Very little additional info. No mention of mac on the box or paperwork, the paperwork is very brief which is not very helpful.

Hoping for some insight before hooking this up? Will it work and anything I have to do other than just plug and play?

My quess is I will have to reformat? Any and all advice appreciated.

D300

Yes.
You just need to format it to work with a mac.
Try this website: How to Format a Hard Drive in Mac OS X | eHow.com
It helped me when I installed my 160gb Harddrive.
Im sorry but the G4's can only run 128gb so you can use the full memory on the Harddrive. You can get a IDE pci card for it tho. And you can buy software but might not work. Thats the only way you can by pass the 127Gb rule.

I use a WD, Seagate, Iomega Mad Dog, CompUSA (Stinks) and another external with all my Macs. Never an issue with any of them. One is a 1TB. A friend has a Seagate 1TB. He likes it. I tried it on my iBook G4 and it came right up.

Is this drive just to be used on the Mac with OSX? If so be sure to open Disk Utility and format it in a Mac format.

What Mac model do you own? You said G4? If it's a Powermac and it has a Firewire port and the Seagate model has Firewire, you will get much faster performance if you use Firewire.

$BoomBoom$ said:

Yes.
You just need to format it to work with a mac.
Try this website: How to Format a Hard Drive in Mac OS X | eHow.com
It helped me when I installed my 160gb Harddrive.
Im sorry but the G4's can only run 128gb so you can use the full memory on the Harddrive. You can get a IDE pci card for it tho. And you can buy software but might not work. Thats the only way you can by pass the 127Gb rule.

Click to expand...

That only applies to INTERNAL IDE drives hooked to the built in IDE controller. It does not affect External USB or Firewire drives in the least.

Also to the OP, the older PowerMac G4's are USB 1.1 so transfer speeds will be SLOW! Try and get a Seagate with Firewire for that reason for sure!!!

My machine is a dual processor G4, don't know what other model info you need. I was wondering about the USB port, I have had my machine about 5 plus years so i thought it might not be USB 2.0.

I just upgraded to 10.5.8 any problem with time machine working with this drive? I have not used timemachine yet as my two internal drives are too full for a complete backup. The main drive is 160 and a second drive is 500GB. but this one is getting full.

D300

Is Extended Journaled the right format for reformatting this drive?

D300

Yes on the Extended (Journalized) format.

That G4 DP is almost for sure USB 1.1. That 1TB Seagate should have both Firewire and USB. Use the Firewire and it's faster than even USB 2.0. If the Seagate is only USB, get a PCI USB card. I got a belkin from Best Buy with the Mac OSX logo on it and it was plug in and play and gave me 5 USB 2.0 ports.

Question re: Disk Utility has been running for hours...

I just bought a 1 TB Seagate portable drive and was following the directions to format the drive for use on my MacBook Pro with Mac OS 10.5.8 (2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo).

The Disk Utility has been running for hours and when I try and restart the computer, I get the message "Quitting in the middle of some operations can leave a disk non-operational" - What should I do??

It should not take that long to format a 1 TB drive with Disk Utility even if the drive was pre-formatted to NTFS. What procedure did you follow?

OP if you want to use an external drive, suggest getting a Firewire external case and fitting drive inside that. Firewire is many, many times faster than USB2, let alone USB1, and it will be bootable. G4's cannot boot using USB.

Disk Utility running for hours...

I ran Disk Utility and chose the Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)