Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Can I just buy any portable external HD for Time Machine usage?
- Thread starter stanny
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Any USB2.0 or Firewire external hard drive will work. You'll just have to format it with Disk Utility.
Yes, as long as you format it properly as HFS.
FAT32
FAT32
- Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
- No individual file larger than 4GB.
- Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
- Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
- To Read/Write NTFS from Leopard: Install MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. You can install both with NTFS-3G for Mac OS X.
- To Read/Write NTFS from Snow Leopard: Guide: Enable native NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard
- (Be aware that some are of the opinion that enabling native NTFS in SL is unstable/unreliable, and favor the MacFuse/NTFS-3G method for Snow Leopard)
- Read/Write HFS from native Mac OS X
- To Read/Write HFS from Windows, Install MacDrive
- To Read HFS (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer
Any USB 2.0 or Firewire 400/800 HDD will do. The HDDs advertised as being made for Mac OS X are just pre-formatted with HFS+, the file system Mac OS X uses.
You can do that yourself via Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility.
Format Your Hard Drive Using Disk Utility
Partition Your Hard Drive With Disk Utility
Also on first connecting an external HDD, you will get prompted with the following message, if you choose YES/USE, the HDD will be formatted correctly.
You can do that yourself via Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility.
Format Your Hard Drive Using Disk Utility
Partition Your Hard Drive With Disk Utility
Also on first connecting an external HDD, you will get prompted with the following message, if you choose YES/USE, the HDD will be formatted correctly.
1. Yes.
2. The only difference between a "hard drive for Mac" and a generic hard drive is that the "hard drive for Mac" will cost more.
3. Avoid hard drives with fancy software installed of them. It is either useless and you pay for it, or it really gets in your way and you still pay for it.
Basically, take any portable hard drive, plug it in your Mac, start "Disk Utility" (in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder), in Disk Utility select the new hard drive, click on "Partition", and choose Format = "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", that is essentially what makes it a hard drive "specificially for Macs". Ten seconds work vs. lots of dollars and it gets rid of any software that you _really_ don't want on your backup drive.
Then you set up Time Machine, that's it. Obviously the first backup always takes quite a while.