External Hard Drive for MAC

[hunnyberry]

I tried buying a Seagate HD yesterday but apparently, its not compatible with my MBA. I love Seagate because of its sleek design and affordable price. Does Seagate make an HD just for MAC? What other brands can you recommend?

 

[B...]

It is. Go into Disk Utility and Format it to Mac Extended Journaled.

 

[flowrider]

I'm running a Seagate Hybrid (Fusion) 500GB 2.5" drive right now on my Air. I have it in an Orico USB3 enclosure. It is my main drive when I am using my Air in a stationary place. I only use the internal drive when I'm on the go. But, as said above, it needs to be formatted for the Mac.

BTW, who told you the drive was not compatible? I know of no SSD, HDD, or SSHD in a proper USB enclosure that is not compatable with a Macintosh.

Lou

 

[bobr1952]

Some "helpful" person probably told you it was not compatible because it was formatted in NTFS--easy to fix as was mentioned by reformatting it with Disk Utility.

 

[Cave Man]

Personally, I never buy canned drives because if they fail under warranty, you have to send it in for repair. More often than not, the drive is fine but the controller fails. If you buy a separate enclosure and hard drive, then assemble them, if a problem arises you can quickly diagnose it without sending the parts in.

 

[flowrider]

^^^^I've bought both. The only failures I've had was with LaCie drives. They used to be good, now - not so much.

Lou

 

[bdrake47]

Seagate USB drives work just fine on Mac. As stated, it needs to be formatted to HFS for Mac, or to FAT if you want to use it on Windoze and Mac without messing with drivers.

 

[ZBoater]

Seagate USB drives work just fine on Mac. As stated, it needs to be formatted to HFS for Mac, or to FAT if you want to use it on Windoze and Mac without messing with drivers.

exFat. FAT has a 4GB partition size limit. FAT32 has a 2TB limit. exFAT is newer and better if you are using Vista or higher.

 

[bdrake47]

exFat. FAT has a 4GB partition size limit. FAT32 has a 2TB limit. exFAT is newer and better if you are using Vista or higher.

Oops, I presumed the OP would use his MBA to format. Yes, exFAT, the last option listed, not [MS-DOS]FAT for cross-platform compatibility.

I recently purchased a couple Toshiba portable drives, they came formatted NTFS but with an OS X driver pre-loaded. I re-formatted one, and using the other as is, haven't seen any noticeable difference at all.

 

[jonasdamn]

Bought seagate backup plus 1TB and really love it, made 500gb for time machine, 500gb fat for smart tv, windows and mac file sharing

 

[jdechko]

Oops, I presumed the OP would use his MBA to format. Yes, exFAT, the last option listed, not [MS-DOS]FAT for cross-platform compatibility.

Not sure if you're aware, but you can format exFat on the Mac too.

 

[0983275]

I went with 2TB WD My Passport, set up 2 partitions, 250GB for Time Machine (encrypted), the rest as exFAT for stuff like movies.

 

[willgreene99]

I really like using the G-Drive Mini. They are small, bus powered and perform well on USB3 and Firewire 800. I get an average of 125MB/s for both Read and Write on USB3 and about 98MB/s on Firewire 800.

They travel well with my 2013 MacBook Air 11" Ultimate and take up such little space.

With 1TB of space, it gives me enough storage when "I need to have almost all of my data with me".

 

[willgreene99]

Whoops, I posted the older model's ports that only have USB2.

Here is the newer one with USB3, that I am using.