How to move music files from hard drive to hard drive?

Good morning all,
I have a question (hopefully not a foolish one) about moving music files. I once had a Mid 2010 Mac desktop that I have since replaced with the latest 21.5 Retina display which I purchased Feb. 2016, this month. I have an external hard drive that I still have from when I had a Windows based PC. I was using the hard drive with the Mid 2010 Mac, but was only able to import music files into ITunes, but could not save anything to the hard drive using my Mac I assume because it was used on a Windows computer first. I would like to purchase a external hard drive made for Mac and transfer all of the music (500GB) from the Windows based external hard drive to a new external made for Mac. Is that possible to do through my new Mac desktop? Is it as simple as plugging them both in to the desktop and dragging and dropping? Or is it something more complicated than that? Thanks!

Jeff

Welcome to the forum. Windows uses NTFS as the default file structure, which I suspect is what is on the drive. OS X can READ but not WRITE to NTFS drives. That is why you could import to iTunes but not save anything to it. There are third party add-ons to OS X that allow writing to NTFS drives. At this website we mostly recommend Paragon NTFS as the best to accomplish that.

As for a new drive, drives are not "made for Mac" as the technology is identical. So you can buy any drive you want and then connect it to the Mac and format it for OS X using Disc Utility in the Utilities folder of Applications. Select the new drive and choose OS X Extended (journaled) as the format you want. That is the OS X default. Then plug in your NTFS drive an copy from there to past to the new drive. Done. If you then want to reuse the old drive, you can do the same formatting using Disk Utility. NOTE: do the copy first because formatting erases everything on the drive.

Thanks MacInWin! Sounds simple enough. As far as the drive I mentioned purchasing, "Made for Mac", I was just assuming that if was already formatted. Since you mentioned that I can use any external hard drive, are there any you recommend brand wise? Looking for at least 1TB. Thanks so much for your response. I know little about the operating system OS X, so I would call myself a newbie. You are a big help, so thanks!

Jeff

fourhayess said:

Thanks MacInWin! Sounds simple enough. As far as the drive I mentioned purchasing, "Made for Mac", I was just assuming that if was already formatted. Since you mentioned that I can use any external hard drive, are there any you recommend brand wise? Looking for at least 1TB. Thanks so much for your response. I know little about the operating system OS X, so I would call myself a newbie. You are a big help, so thanks!

Click to expand...

Hi Jeff - yes, 'Made for Mac' simply means the drive is formatted as OS X Extended (journaled), as Jake has already mentioned, so you could certainly purchase such a HD or simply format any HD using OS X's Disk Utility, again as described. As to brands, Western Digital is often recommended here (and I own several); I also have several bought from Other World Computing, a company dedicated to Apple products. Seagate HDs are known to have higher failure rates and are usually not suggested.

Your other considerations are: 1) Connection to your computer, i.e. USB vs. Thunderbolt; and 2) Bus-powered vs. AC adapter power - for myself, I have all bus-powered drives, but a number here suggest using AC adapters - if you used an USB hub, make sure that it is AC powered. Should provide enough information to get you started. Dave

Thanks Dave! This has been very helpful. I appreciate you folks!