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Seagate Freeagent Desk

I

ibis99

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 14, 2010
131
0
So I just picked up one of these external HD's at Best Buy for $25 with coupons. The thing is they had none formatted for a Mac so it is formatted for a PC. Is it safe to assume that I can simply reformat it to work on my new iMac?
 
Good Question.

I have a 1 TB Free Agent myself. HOWEVER, the box it came in has a tiny orange box on it that says "For MAC".:D

If it has the orange box you have free sailing ahead of you. :cool: If not, good luck.:eek:
 
Pretty much all hard drives will work with Mac. Just go home and format it for, in disk utility, (FAT), if you want to use the drive on Windows as well, or Mac HFS if you want to only use it for Mac,
 
pt0016 said:
Pretty much all hard drives will work with Mac. Just go home and format it for, in disk utility, (FAT), if you want to use the drive on Windows as well, or Mac HFS if you want to only use it for Mac,
Click to expand...

I agree. When formatting as FAT, do use the iMac Disk utility - to format entire 1 TB drive as FAT. Using a Windows Disk utility won't allow the "entire drive" to be formatted as FAT. When using FAT, the file cannot be more then 4 (or is that 6 ??) GB is length. And, one cannot use File Names longer then 255 characters either.

But for basic file sharing between Windows and Mac OS, formatting as FAT works great. If wondering, I formatted my WD Passport portable 2.5" 500GB as FAT. It works great as FAT format. And, one can read/write to it from both MAC and Windows platforms.... For my use, I'd do it again.

But... I also have WD 1 TB using Time Machine for automatic backups. Thus, having dedicated backup for my iMac (as well).

.
 
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