Western Digital My Book Essential 3TB external

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Greetings folks,

This is my first post on this forum. I've recently (and cautiously) embarked on the "to-MAC" conversion and took my wife with me for the ride....MacBook Air for me and iMac for her.

I will not even bother with our frustrations as we're going through the learning curve....it's part of the deal. Email transfer is by far the biggest disappointment.

My question pertains to external drives. Does anyone have any experience with the drive in the title of this thread? I recently bought one. I'm learning about formatting differences and how others dislike connecting to external drives via USB, etc. Have I bought something that is generally not used by the Mac community? All the computer stores sales folk seem to be bigger fans of Windows-based computing, so strong bias and lower level of Mac knowledge.

If anyone has specific experience with this drive or has other recommendations, I am all ears and would appreciate the advice.
 
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That drive comes pre-formatted with the NTFS file system. OSX can natively read from NTFS but it can't write to it.

Your options really depend on how you intend to use it.
If it's going to be used purely for Mac use, I'd go to Disk Utility and format for mac HFS+.
If you want to exchange/share files across OSX and Windows, leave it as NTFS and treat yourself to a $20 copy of Paragon's NTFS software. Which enables read and write of NTFS on OSX.

The alternative is to get yourself a different drive that supports not just USB but firewire and/or thunderbolt as an interface.

Welcome to the forums btw. There are many knowledgeable and friendly people on here. I switched in 2007 this forum was been the single biggest resource for learning Mac.

Feel free to start a new thread on your email issues and anything else. There's no saying there's an answer for every query but if nothing else it may help ease the transition.
 

dtravis7


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Mr Plow covered the drive question.

Please do start another thread with your Mail and other issues. We will be glad to help!
 

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