need help building ext. hard drive

[notwist]

I have an old 120gig hard drive in my PC desktop I would like to put in an external enclosure for use with my MacBook. THe hard drive is NTFS. Am I supposed to format the hard drive, then place it in the enclosure? Or can I just put in the enclosure, connect it to my macbook and my macbook take care of everything? Also, if I get an enclosure with FW800 ports, will it also work with my macbook if it is only FW400 capable? Thanks in advance.

 

[ricksbrain]

If you connect it to your macbook, in Disk Utility, you should be able to reformat it however you want-- HFS+ Journaled, likely...

I think FW800 is backward compatible, but not certain.

 

[Makosuke]

FW800 is backward compatible with FW400 ports with the right cable, although if you don't have a computer with a FW800 port I'm not quite sure why you'd want to spend the extra on a case and cables that you can't make full use of.

Also, if it's an older 120GB drive, I'm not even sure there'd be much of a speed boost with FW800--since FW400 can (theoretically) support up to 50MB/s transfer, it can probably handle as much data as the drive can spit out.