I just got a brand new Mac Book Pro. I wanted to get an external harddrive for it. I have a gift card to HP and wanted to buy one from them? Does anyone know if they are compatable? If not, anyone have any suggestions for a HD that is good, but not terribly expensive? I want one that is at least 250 GB. Thanks.
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Do HP external hard drives work with Mac Book Pro?
- Thread starter kduce23
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Mac Guide on External Hard Drives
Any external hard drive will work with PCs or Macs, as long as the connectors are there (Firewire, USB, etc.) It doesn't matter how the drive is formatted out of the box, since you can re-format any way you like. Formatting in HFS (Mac OS Extended) or FAT32 or NTFS-3G can be done with the Mac OS X Disk Utility.
FAT32
Searching the forum with MRoogle will usually find answers to most of your questions:
http://guides.macrumors.com/External_Hard_Drives
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Any external hard drive will work with PCs or Macs, as long as the connectors are there (Firewire, USB, etc.) It doesn't matter how the drive is formatted out of the box, since you can re-format any way you like. 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.
- 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
Searching the forum with MRoogle will usually find answers to most of your questions:
http://guides.macrumors.com/External_Hard_Drives
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/904281/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/899614/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/883573/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/875630/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/861006/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/824809/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/849529/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/847438/[/url]
[url=https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/834250/[/url]
... and many, many others.
hey
OFC but you need to format it, pc hard drives come in ntsf format which is not mac compatible,, you buy it and plug it in it will open your disk utility and then you erase and format it into mac os journaled (journaled means its indexed for faster searching) and it puts in the fat format which does not prefer files over 4 gb but works with the mac =D hehe i am running a 2 TB western digital, i LOVE i can run time machine and back up every individually =D
OFC but you need to format it, pc hard drives come in ntsf format which is not mac compatible,, you buy it and plug it in it will open your disk utility and then you erase and format it into mac os journaled (journaled means its indexed for faster searching) and it puts in the fat format which does not prefer files over 4 gb but works with the mac =D hehe i am running a 2 TB western digital, i LOVE i can run time machine and back up every individually =D