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bilal25

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 10, 2014
27
0
Mumbai, India
hey guys.. im buying a macbook pro retina. now i know wd my passport ultra doesnt write with macbooks but if i install the ntfs driver for mac from the seagate site.The link for the download is below.

http://www.seagate.com/in/en/support/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/goflex-slim/ntfs-driver-for-mac-os-master-dl/

Will it work with the WD my passport ultra? should i download it?
Will be great if u guys can assist me.

I'd transfer the files to another drive or the internal drive of your macbook then reformat that external drive to exFAT and then transfer the files back to the external. That way it readable and writeable for both a Mac and Windows machine.
 
hey guys.. im buying a macbook pro retina. now i know wd my passport ultra doesnt write with macbooks but if i install the ntfs driver for mac from the seagate site.The link for the download is below.

http://www.seagate.com/in/en/support/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/goflex-slim/ntfs-driver-for-mac-os-master-dl/

Will it work with the WD my passport ultra? should i download it?
Will be great if u guys can assist me.

I would be willing to bet they have that software locked down so it only works on Seagate drives. You will need to buy something like Paragon NTFS or use something cross platform compatible like ExFAT as SVTmaniac mentioned.
 
i came to know that i can only transfer 4gb on fat32. is it per file or is it the complete folder?
and how much can i transfer on exfat?
 
i came to know that i can only transfer 4gb on fat32. is it per file or is it the complete folder?
and how much can i transfer on exfat?

That 4GB limit is per file in FAT32 not a total of 4GB. So you could transfer a metric buttload of 3.9GB files and be fine.

ExFAT gets around that 4GB per file limit.

The only issue with ExFAT and FAT32 both is they are not journaled, so it is more susceptible to data loss if there is a power outage or the drive is accidentally ejected in mid-copy.
 
i had used my external hard drive on a friends imac...it worked fine and the files were copying as well as reading on it. Does this only happen on a macbook pro?
 
i had used my external hard drive on a friends imac...it worked fine and the files were copying as well as reading on it. Does this only happen on a macbook pro?

Are you sure the drive was formatted as NTFS? Maybe he had the Paragon drivers installed. If you need to move files between Windows and OS X then just format the drive with Fat32 or exFat. Make sure you have a backup since ANY portable drive can fail, get dropped, get stolen, etc.
 
i had used my external hard drive on a friends imac...it worked fine and the files were copying as well as reading on it. Does this only happen on a macbook pro?

I'm guessing that drive came out of the box formatted to FAT32 and that's why you can read/write in Windows and a Mac. It would be any Mac, not just a MacBook Pro. If you select the volume in Disk Utility on OS X you can see at the bottom what format it is in.
 
I'm guessing that drive came out of the box formatted to FAT32 and that's why you can read/write in Windows and a Mac. It would be any Mac, not just a MacBook Pro. If you select the volume in Disk Utility on OS X you can see at the bottom what format it is in.

Thanks for the advice buddy..next time i do visit il definately have a check in disk utility.
 
hey guys i got my Rmbp and connected my hard drive..it said read only but it was still writing..any thing weird about this?
 
Natively OS X will go into "Read-Only" on Snow Leopard and earlier, Lion to Mavericks it does support limited read/write but if the drive has Windows NTFS level permissions or some kind of corruption due to being unplugged without being "safely removed/unmounted"(Windows/OS X) sometimes it'll get stuck in "Read-Only" until a Windows PC runs Scan Disk.

You can install the NTFS driver from Seagate, it'll work on non-Seagate/Samsung/Maxtor drives but if you have an issue relating to the driver you'll have no support. I own a few Seagates but the only NTFS drives I share with Macs is a WD Passport(750GB) and a Seagate Backup Plus 2TB.
 
Natively OS X will go into "Read-Only" on Snow Leopard and earlier, Lion to Mavericks it does support limited read/write but if the drive has Windows NTFS level permissions or some kind of corruption due to being unplugged without being "safely removed/unmounted"(Windows/OS X) sometimes it'll get stuck in "Read-Only" until a Windows PC runs Scan Disk.

You can install the NTFS driver from Seagate, it'll work on non-Seagate/Samsung/Maxtor drives but if you have an issue relating to the driver you'll have no support. I own a few Seagates but the only NTFS drives I share with Macs is a WD Passport(750GB) and a Seagate Backup Plus 2TB.

yea as you said there is limited read/write..thats coz i can't paste back into the external hdd.
 
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