external HD ?

[blueglide]

I am looking at the 500 GB My Passport Essentials and the passport studio. The Essentials is cheaper, but is it hard to format to mac? It seems easy nuff from reading about it. Studio is already mac formatted has FireWire and is time machine compatible. If I get leopard in the future will i be able to make the Passport Essentials compatible with Time Machine? Is the FireWire worth the extra cash?

Thanks

 

[BlueRevolution]

Any hard drive can be formatted for Mac in a matter of seconds. All external hard drives are Time Machine-compatible. I can't really comment on the FireWire, though.

 

[blueglide]

Sounds good thanks. The mac formatted ones are more expensive!

 

[PirateBob]

Sounds good thanks. The mac formatted ones are more expensive!

?

 

[blueglide]

?

It seems that way from what I've seen.....If they say formatted for mac on the box they seem too cost a bit more. I could be wrong.

 

[BlueRevolution]

That'd be the idiot tax. Any hard drive will work.

 

[finnschi]

BlueRevolution is RIGHT!
If you are on a budget, get any 3,5"/2.5" Hardrive and then put it into some external enclosure.. of course the mybook and stuff look nicer,... but at the end its the same!

And don't worry formating your HDD for mac (HSF+) just takes one second!

Applications-->utilities--->Disk Utility select the External Harddrive and go to Erase, and then just select HSF+ (journaled) and press Erase!!

Done! , its really easy! and works 100% with time machine!

Ps: I would recomeend a firewire Drive!

1. Too occupy that lonely port
2. It feels faster than Usb2.0 (real speed is supposed to be slower... 480mbps for USB 2.0 and 400mbps for firewire)
3. I heard about Firewire 800....
4. I heard about eSata

 

[blueglide]

That'd be the idiot tax. Any hard drive will work.

LOL, Thanks guys

 

[blueglide]

Ok one more question. I got an external and it's formatted FAT 32. I can still put stuff on it and read from it. So why would I need to format it to HSF+?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Basically, HFS+ stores more information on the files you save (owner, metadata and so forth), is less prone to corruption, and doesn't have problems with fragmentation. FAT32 also has a limit of 4 GiB per file, which was massive back in the day, but can be pretty constraining today.

If possible (if you're only using the drive with Macs), you should always format to HFS+.

 

[blueglide]

Thanks again!