External hard drive, can i buy a PC one.

[jimgeo68]

I'm new to macs.

On my vista / xp machines, I have several external hard drives, Seagate, WD, HP, and 1 enclosure kit which contains some old internal hard drive.

I don't really need all these drives on my VISTA/XP machines, as I'm trying to migrate to MAC.

I mostly use my mac for photos & creating home movies. So backing up the priceless pictures of my kids is critical.

Do I really need to buy a MAC based external hard drive? or can i simply reformat one of my old drives to use on my mac. I know macs have their own file system (as pc's have fat32&ntfs).

Will apple time machine work with a generic re-formatted external hard drive.

I also notice their are fewer choices for MAC ready external hard drives ...less specials than PC based externals.

Thanks for the help.

jimgeo68

 

[GGJstudios]

You can use any hard drive on Mac or Windows. They're not OS-specific. All you have to do is format it correctly, which is simple to do. Yes, Time Machine will work fine.