Switcher in progress

[Vice]

Hey,

I've been lurking on this forum for a few weeks now, and I'm learning a lot about apple products.

I'm planning on getting a new uMBP 15in for college in a few weeks, and have a question about the switch.

I'm on a windows PC right now, with a 150gb raptor master drive, and a 1tb sata slave drive. My plan was to backup everything to my slave drive, and trasfer it to my new mac via an external hd enclosure.

My question is, will the mac read the data on the slave drive? I have heard reports of needing to format it to mac version, but this would negate the purpose of backing everything up to it in the first place.

I plan on using this drive as my external in college as well, for backups, storing my movies, etc.

Thanks.

 

[chrismac]

The Mac will see the drive. That's how I transfered my data across.

 

[iPod Nano]

If it's just a brand of external drive, yes.

If it's a different type of external drive I haven't heard of, most likely no.

Sorry, I don't know what a "slave drive" is.

 

[Vice]

A slave drive is just a second hard drive. If you have two drives, the one with the OS on it is the "master" drive, on which everything boots, and the second drive, called the "slave", is like a storage drive.

I have both hard drives in my computer now, and I plan on buying an external enclosure to put my storage drive in.

 

[FreakTimmah]

OS X will read an NTFS file system but it can't write to one. so yes you can transfer files from your old system but you can't move files back and forth. It's preaty easy to partition the drive however if you wanted to use the external for time machine backups and still keep your important files.

 

[Wynnefield]

i have a 500GB MyBook i use as a slave on a windows network and have no problems transferring to or from my Macbook Pro via an alternate USB flash drive (my Mac would not recognize it as another drive due to its formatting.) however, i have a Seagate Free Agent Go for Mac on the way from Amazon. it is already formatted for the Mac and comes with firewire 800, 800 to 400 and USB cables, as well as a firewire 800 dock.

i plan to use this solely for my Mac and configure Time Machine to use it for daily back ups. although i have backed up a few media files and some sensitive system files from my Mac, i'm keeping the MyBook as a network drive.