Would any external hard drive work with a mac?


Recommended Posts

So I am just checking around, and found some of those Western Digital essentials I think that's what they are called. They are small slim ones. Would they work with mac out of the box?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Ok so I checked my external one. Is it possible to leave the partitions I have there now alone, and then make another partition for mac to use?

Sure, if there is any free space available. You may have to delete some partitions and remake them in order to properly allocate the space for your Mac partition. You might be able to adjust the partition sizes. My personal preference is to avoid tweaking partition sizes. If you have to tweak a partition size then you MUST have a reliable backup of the data. If you have a backup of the data (which you should anyway if any of the data is worth anything to you), then you might as well format and start over with the partition table. Restoring your data to the drive afterwards.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure, if there is any free space available. You may have to delete some partitions and remake them in order to properly allocate the space for your Mac partition. You might be able to adjust the partition sizes. My personal preference is to avoid tweaking partition sizes. If you have to tweak a partition size then you MUST have a reliable backup of the data. If you have a backup of the data (which you should anyway if any of the data is worth anything to you), then you might as well format and start over with the partition table. Restoring your data to the drive afterwards.

Yeah right now, i have over 400gig of unused space in a partition that I dont use. It's NTFS. I Could just format that partition to mac stuff right?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah right now, i have over 400gig of unused space in a partition that I dont use. It's NTFS. I Could just format that partition to mac stuff right?

Open up Disk Utility and you can just format the partition as HFS+ (Journaled).

Screen%20shot%202010-02-23%20at%2014.59.22.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Time Machine only supports HFS+ volumes.

What do you mean exactly? Sorry I am new to this.

Couldn't I do one partition for my backup/extra stuff.

and one for time machine only?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What do you mean exactly? Sorry I am new to this.

Open Disk Utility and format the partition you want to use for Time Machine backups as 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)', as per the screenshot above.

Time Machine should then detect it as a supported volume.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Open Disk Utility and format the partition you want to use for Time Machine backups as 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)', as per the screenshot above.

Time Machine should then detect it as a supported volume.

Oh ok cool cool. So my idea should be ok.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Funny, I had a 500GB HDD that was in my HP Docking station. The HP is no longer in use, so I pulled out the drive, converted the fan to AC power, and bought a vantec IDE/SATA to USB 2.0 adapter.

Now I have an external 500GB USB drive partitioned as:

250GB Time Machine

150GB HFS

100GB FAT32 ** Shared across network to windows machines (also allows me to do direct access without mac)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah right now, i have over 400gig of unused space in a partition that I dont use. It's NTFS. I Could just format that partition to mac stuff right?

If you don't use the NTFS partition and want to format it to HFS+ so Time Machine can use it, then just do that :). Just remember you will lose everything in that NTFS partition.

You seem to be rightfully nervous because you don't seem to understand the concepts. I'll try to explain briefly (and in an oversimplified fashion):

A hard drive is just a data store consisting of lots and lots of bits. The hard drive itself couldn't careless if a particular bit is a 0 or a 1. It gets an address range from the controller and spits out the values it has between those addresses. In order for an OS (such as Mac OS, Windows or Linux) to make heads or tails of these bit values that the HDD reports to it, the OS needs to know what the format of that data is. The format is nothing more than an arbitrary system that is defined as a file system. Each OS has its own requirements for a file system, so the authors of each OS developed a file system standard that meets their requirements. For Microsoft OSes, the two big ones are FAT32 and NTFS. HFS+ is the one currently used by Apple in Mac OS X. What defines the file systems that are in use on a HDD is something called the partition table. The partition table sits in the first couple of addressable bytes at the beginning of a HDD. This table defines the addressable ranges, and what file system those addressable ranges use. When you re-define these ranges and file systems of these partitions you risk losing data. Even a simple change in the beginning or ending address of a partition can make the data unreadable to the OS. That's why a good backup of important data should always be a prerequisite to manipulating a partition table.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you don't use the NTFS partition and want to format it to HFS+ so Time Machine can use it, then just do that :). Just remember you will lose everything in that NTFS partition.

You seem to be rightfully nervous because you don't seem to understand the concepts. I'll try to explain briefly (and in an oversimplified fashion):

A hard drive is just a data store consisting of lots and lots of bits. The hard drive itself couldn't careless if a particular bit is a 0 or a 1. It gets an address range from the controller and spits out the values it has between those addresses. In order for an OS (such as Mac OS, Windows or Linux) to make heads or tails of these bit values that the HDD reports to it, the OS needs to know what the format of that data is. The format is nothing more than an arbitrary system that is defined as a file system. Each OS has its own requirements for a file system, so the authors of each OS developed a file system standard that meets their requirements. For Microsoft OSes, the two big ones are FAT32 and NTFS. HFS+ is the one currently used by Apple in Mac OS X. What defines the file systems that are in use on a HDD is something called the partition table. The partition table sits in the first couple of addressable bytes at the beginning of a HDD. This table defines the addressable ranges, and what file system those addressable ranges use. When you re-define these ranges and file systems of these partitions you risk losing data. Even a simple change in the beginning or ending address of a partition can make the data unreadable to the OS. That's why a good backup of important data should always be a prerequisite to manipulating a partition table.

Thanks for explaining it. However if nothing is in that 400gig of unused space thats NTFS if I format it to HFS, I wont lose anything.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.