New external hard drive- formatting

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Hi, I got an new ext. hard drive for Christmas (Barracuda 7200 320) and plugged it in; OSX sees it but says the computer needs to initialize it, I've opened up Disk Ute. but how do I properly format it for Mac? (Btw, it says it only has 298GB instead of 320ish, preferably I'd like to gain some of that space too). Cheers
EDIT- It's formatted now, but still only ~298/320GB is shown as its capacity? Thoughts? Thankx
Smile like you mean it

 

[trogdor!]

....

 

[gauchogolfer]

Formatted capacity will be lower then the size of the drive. 298 sounds about right for a 320gb drive. I have a 320 I just formatted and it was about the same formatted size. The formatting uses about 6 - 9% roughly of the drive space. I have external 500gb also that when formated is 469gb. This is perfectly normal and it normaly says right on the hard drive box that formatted capicity will be less.

'Formatting' does not in fact take up 6-9% of space, but rather a very tiny fraction of that. What you're seeing is a battle between marketing and technology. Marketing calls a kilobyte 1000 bytes, while technically it's 1024 bytes. Multiply this disparity up to 320GB, and 298GB is what you get. It's as simple as that.

 

[trogdor!]

'Formatting' does not in fact take up 6-9% of space, but rather a very tiny fraction of that. What you're seeing is a battle between marketing and technology. Marketing calls a kilobyte 1000 bytes, while technically it's 1024 bytes. Multiply this disparity up to 320GB, and 298GB is what you get. It's as simple as that.

woops, my bad, sorry for the misinformation

 

[yOyOYoo]

check the manufacturer's website.

I just got a Seagate 250gb external HD at compusa and I ran into the same problem you did.

I went to the Seagate homepage and found the right way to erase and reformat the drive to work with my Mac.

Now i'm not sure if I should just go ahead and delete all my music files to save space and move all my MP3s onto the hard drive.

 

[CanadaRAM]

And the answer is...
If you are going to use the drive exclusively with OSX, then format it Macintosh Extended (or HFS+). If you are going to use it in common between OSX and BootCamp data, OR if you are going to move it from a Mac to a PC, then format it to MS-DOS (FAT32) format with Disk Utility.

 

[yOyOYoo]

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/external_mac_initial.html

here's your answer! hopefully it works for your hard drive too.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

'Formatting' does not in fact take up 6-9% of space, but rather a very tiny fraction of that. What you're seeing is a battle between marketing and technology. Marketing calls a kilobyte 1000 bytes, while technically it's 1024 bytes. Multiply this disparity up to 320GB, and 298GB is what you get. It's as simple as that.

Now I get it, thanks a lot. Still. Please don't advertise that if that's not what you get!
Btw, I have another thread about replacing my iBook's internal HD- hopefully I can get a 120GB HD, what I can afford, anyway, what will be its "marketing vs technology" actual capacity; without OSX or anything on it?
Cheers
EDIT- any good (free) backup apps out there? Just a disk image or what?