I just purchased a 500gb My Book Pro for video editing. Does it need to be formatted? The manual gives instructions for the formatting and a web site - but the web page won't open. Any help would be appreciated.
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Do External Hard Drives Need To Be Formatted?
- Thread starter KARROT
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I reformatted my 4 external hard drives go to Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.
Then click on the external drive then click on erase then reformat it to the journalled and name it what you want
Is HFS+ and Mac OS Extended (journaled) the same thing? Since I am using it only on a Mac, do I only have one Partition? - Thanks again for all the help.
Yes and yes. You should use Mac OS Extended (journaled), and you only need one partition, unless you have a specific reason for a second (e.g. keeping a separate bootable backup or something like that).
I just got a 500GB drive (7200.10 Seagate Barracuda, SATA enclosure) too and went through partitioning. My uses are different, but anyway I ended up making five Mac OS Extended (journaled) partitions... two each for backing up two different computers' internal drives, and then a fifth spillover drive.
But for your use, one partition may be plenty. Thanks so much for the advice/help. Wish I had found this site a long time ago. All the info is great!
If I wanted to partition part of the drive, (41gb), in case I wanted some PC data, would I follow the same steps?