Mac-Specific USB hard drives?

[Mr. MacBook]

Do i need a mac USB hard drive, or any usb external drive is fine?

 

[dops7107]

Any one will do, but you may have to format it first if it comes pre-formatted in NTFS. (Not sure if hard drives come pre-formatted at all, come to think of it)

 

[epochblue]

Like TPAM said, all harddrives are the same until your format them 🙂

Macs can read FAT32, HFS+ and NTFS. They cannot write to NTFS, however.
Windows can read/write FAT32 and NTFS, but not HFS.

So if you intend to share this with a Windows PC, I recommend formatting as FAT32. If it'll ONLY be used with your Mac, I'd go with HFS+ (because...well, why not?)

 

[CanadaRAM]

And... if you can pay the extra money for a USB/Firewire drive, Firewire 400 delivers approx. 2 x the real world performance of USB 2.0