Jumping in with both feet !. Only took 10 years.

My son got his first Mac Book when he was 10. He's been a Mac evangelist ever since. Now that he's 20, and on his second Mac Book Pro, I called him last night to tell him I"m making the "switch"...

He was stunned. I've been a PC guy for the last 30 years. Gateway. Too many to count. So, here I am, about 30 days from making my purchase and I find this fantastic place to look for advice.

I use my machine for video editing, music, photos, the usual stuff. I use the Adobe Creative Suite of products and my machine grinds away when rendering video files...It's 6 years old (I know, I know)

So, new iMac 27 inch is in my sights. My question today is this (I did spend some time looking for an answer here but didn't find an answer), I have 5 separate hard drives, 3 internal and 2 external. My new imac will have 2TB on board. I will have a 2TB external drive as well which is less than a year old. Will itl need to be formatted to work with the iMac or will it see it when I plug it in ?

I know it's a basic question but I have a lot of stuff I'm going to have to be able to get to once I hook up the new iMac. Trying to do my homework now so I'm ready when the end of the month gets here and I go shopping.

Thanks in advance for your opinions / input.

Do you know how your 2TB External is formatted? If it's FAT32 it will work with OSX just fine, but I would later move the files and format it native OSX. If it's NTFS, out of the box, you will be able to plug it in and read the files but not write. There are a few ways to enable NTFS Write, one a terminal command and a few apps. If I were you though and only going to use the external with your new iMac, I would copy off the files and again partiton the drive using Apples file system.

Paragon is the best (to me) software for using OSX with NTFS formated drives.

Welcome to Mac Forums BTW! Feel free to ask away and we will do our best to help.

I would strongly recommend that you format all drives you are going to use with your Mac to be Mac OS X formatted. NTFS support (and I'm sure that's how your existing drives are formatted because you mention video) is unsupported and neither Paragon nor Apple will help if (when?) you lose something due to using NTFS. Paragon, good as it is, is a hackaround like all the other NTFS solutions -- so there's no guarantee it will carry on being supported in future OS X updates (and ipso facto, there's no evidence that Apple may someday fully support NTFS as an equal format -- though I think that unlikely!).