Should new external hard drives be formatted?

Drives usually come formatted, but you should know which format. It could be formatted for Mac or Windows. I prefer to format drives myself, to make sure it's done right.

Formatting in HFS (Mac OS Extended) or FAT32 or NTFS-3G can be done with the Mac OS X Disk Utility.

FAT32

• Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
• No individual file larger than 4GB.

NTFS

• 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)

HFS

• 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

Just in case the previous message wasn't totally clear to you, the answer depends on what computers you plan to use the drive with, and how you plan to use the drive.

The native file system for the Mac is called HFS+, which Disk Utility calls "Mac OS Extended". If you will only use your drive with a Macintosh, then for best results you should format the drive as Mac OS Extended. There is a feature of Mac OS Extended called "journaling" which helps the disk stay stable in the event of something like a power failure while it's writing out files (I'm oversimplifying here). So when formatting, I would choose the "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" flavor.

If you'll be sharing the drive with Windows PCs, then you may consider formatting it as FAT32, like the previous poster stated. Both Windows and Mac can read FAT32, but there are some restrictions mentioned in the previous post that you should be aware of. If you want to remove those restrictions for added complexity and possibly different restrictions, then you could format it as NTFS, which is a more modern Microsoft file system. The only problem is that the Mac can't write out to an NTFS drive, so you'd have to install a 3rd party tool to enable that.

If you just want to use the drive to store your Time Machine backups for your Mac and that's it, set it to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" and you'll be set. To find out how your drive is currently formatted, select the drive on your desktop and choose File->Get Info and the Get Info window will state something like "Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".

If the drive is already formatted from the factory the way you want, then you're good to go!

Good luck!

Yep, you're fine to just leave it. It already came formatted to what you needed.

Help!! Formatting Hd

Hello,
Im new at this so please help! i was formatting my new ext hd and did a few times and now it does recognize the hd what did i do?