trouble using external hardrive?

just got a new macbook pro = upgraded to the SSD memory. I currently have a seagate external hard drive (250gb) that I used with my old PC. I could drag and drop the files (mostly photos and some word dox) to my mac with no issues. But when I try to drag and drop from my mac to the seagate external drive, it does not allow me to.

How do I save files to the external hard drive? I would like to be able to do a "mass dump". Is my hard drive compatible with the mac, or do I need a mac compatible hard drive?

thanks

You will need Paragon's NTFS for Mac in order to write to an NTFS drive.

Paragon Software for Home - partition manager, backup&recovery, hard disk manager for PC

If you no longer have a Windows machine and have retrieved everything from the drive you need - you can also format the drive to HFS.

How do I save files to the external hard drive? I would like to be able to do a "mass dump". Is my hard drive compatible with the mac, or do I need a mac compatible hard drive?

Click to expand...

Since your Seagate drive is probably formatted to NTFS, that means it's read only from the Mac. You can either reformat the drive to the Mac standard HFS + Journaled format or buy a third party driver that will enable you to write to the drive. We recommend Paragon NTFS from Paragon Software $19.95. LINK

thanks - I still have my PC up and running, if I reformat I am guessing I cannot use it on my PC then? Is there any option that can go back and forth? or am I best reformatting and then using a SD card for a file or two that I go back and forth on?

We gave you the best option above.... buy Paragon NTFS for OS X. That will allow you to continue using the external Seagate drive both for your PC and Mac.

gotcha - I misunderstood, I thought you meant if I use Paragon I would be reformatting it and not be able to use on PC. I am no familiar with NTFS and HFS. If I choose to just reformat it, how do I do that? Do I need a 3rd party software or can I do it from my mac?

NTFS is the drive format used by Windows.
HFS is the drive format used by OS X.

OS X can read but not write to NTFS formatted drives.
I don't believe Windows is able to read and for sure cannot write to HFS formatted drives.

If you're going to use the external drive physically attached to both a Windows and an OS X computer, spend the $20 on the Paragon NTFS for Mac and you can then forget that you even needed to know all this stuff.

If you reformat the drive to HFS, then you would need to spend the same $20 for your windows computer to be able to write to the drive for Paragon's HFS for Windows.

Formatting the drive would be done in Disk Utility located in Applications / Utilities and is pretty straight forward. Here's a How to.

I'm glad I found this thread. It seems very helpful.

Question(s):
I have an iomega 500GB external HD with a good number of files stored on it. It's always been used on a PC, so, according to above, it is NTFS formatted. If I purchase Paragon NTFS for Mac, this will allow me to read AND write to the HD on my MBA, correct?

Would I need to remove all my files from the HD before formatting it for NTFS for Mac?

I learn new tasks all the time, but I still consider myself a novice when it comes to software, etc. So, thank you in advance for further explaining.

If the external drive is formatted NTFS, then Paragon will allow your MBA to read and write to that disk with nothing else for you to do. No formatting is required. You don't need to remove any files. Paragon simply allows OSX to write to NTFS drives.

Makes sense MacInWin. Thanks for the explanation.