HELP WITH Fujitsu Storagebird 2TB External Hard Drive

[ruudiboy]

How can i useFujitsu Storagebird 2TB External Hard Drive Hi Speed USB on my imac it has no software and there is no mention of mac in manual, has anyone else bought one of these?

 

[chscag]

Your Mac does not need drivers to "see" an external USB hard drive. Just plug it in and it should mount on your desktop. This assumes of course that the drive is formatted. And it will probably be formatted to NTFS which means that it will be read only unless you use third party software or if Snow Leopard, turn on its NTFS R/W capability.

Regards.

 

[ruudiboy]

I have an imac 27 i am new to mac, it does see it as "Volume" in the right corner of screen but when i open it and try to drag in or paste it won't allow me.

 

[cwa107]

That's because it's formatted in the NTFS filesystem, which is native to Windows. Mac OS X can READ NTFS drives, but can not write to them.

Your options are as follows:

1. Format the drive in the Mac's native filesystem (HFS+), this is done in Disk Utility (Applications => Utilities). But bear in mind that this will make it incompatible with Windows, without a third-party driver.

2. Use a 3rd party filesystem drive for the Mac. NTFS-3G for Mac OS X is free, but some say it is unstable. I recommend Paragon's $30 NTFS for Mac OS X. Another option that chscag alluded to is to use OS X 10.6's native NTFS R/W driver, but that is still sort of in development and is not officially supported. If you Google NTFS Mac OS X 10.6, you should find tutorials to turn it on, but I wouldn't recommend it at the moment.

3. Format the drive in FAT32. FAT32 is an older filesystem, but is still useful for cross-platform compatibility. It has some limitations but works with both Windows and Mac OS X. The biggest problem is that Windows imposes a 32GB limit on partition sizes for FAT32... So, in that case, you'll need to format the drive under OS X in order to get a full 2TB volume.

 

[ruudiboy]

The first option sounds good
1. Format the drive in the Mac's native filesystem (HFS+), this is done in Disk Utility (Applications => Utilities). i won't be using the drive for anything else but video storage for imovie and Final cut & AVCHD files.
Question is how do i do this i am new to this and have no idea.

 

[cwa107]

Go into Applications => Utilities and open Disk Utility.

 

[ruudiboy]

Before i do this... if it does not work can i return it to original and send it back or is this step final!

 

[cwa107]

Yore not doing anything permanent, just prepping the drive for use. You can always revert back if need be.

 

[ruudiboy]

That worked great thanks for your help.