External HDD Help

[zandre88]

Hey everyone,

I hope this is the right forum for this thread if not please feel free to move it of course. Anyways, other than my iPod and iPhone, I am a PC guy. So I know little to nothing about MAC computers so I need a little help picking out an external HDD. My sister just bought a brand new MAC Book Pro and it has the new Lion operating system on it. I decided I'd get her an external HDD for her as a going away gift so she could keep her multimedia on it, back-up her internal HDD, etc.

Anyways, I'd like to get her a 1TB external HDD. No more than $100 shipped. However, every single one I've looked at so far only says they are compatible with MAC OS X Tiger or Leopard. I am sure that they will more than likely still work fine with Lion but I just want to be sure before I buy it and send it to her. I also know it more than likely the details page on Newegg for the ones I have looked at haven't been updated in quite sometime because they also said compatible with Windows XP/Vista. Although, I just want to be sure.

So if someone could confirm that or maybe give me a couple of suggestions it'd be really appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

You can buy any external HDD pretty much these days and it'll work on your mac. You'll just have to format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) when you plug it in the first time. I haven't come across an external drive yet that this didn't work on

To expand slightly on that, some drives (like the WD 2.5" ones) come with some preinstalled software that offers to backup the drive for you or annoy the **** out of you for free, that won't work on Macs and will be removed when you format in most cases. But that's a good thing

 

[35g700]

Well, almost every computer today is a "MAC" computer seeing as most computers have network cards in them that have MAC addresses...

Most external hard disks come formatted in FAT32 which is compatible with OS X, if the drive is formatted in NTFS then I would recommend formatting it to FAT32 because formatting it to the OS X Extended could cause some issues if she wants to use the drive with computers running Windows.

Are you looking at 2.5" drives or 3.5" drives? 3.5" drives are quite a bit cheaper than the 2.5" ones (my friend got a 2TB USB 3 one at best buy for $90) but you'll need to connect the drive to some sort of an AC power source.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

I wouldn't recommend FAT32 these days, it's too antiquated.
There's no journaling (meaning file corruption is much easier), it's less secure, and of course cannot handle files bigger than 4Gb (which is a big problem when you consider any HD movie is likely to be 4.2Gb+).
NTFS is much more reliable, faster, and you can download drivers for your mac to support writing to the drive. That's what I've got in place for my work mac, all my external drives are NTFS but the mac can still read/write.

 

[zandre88]

Thanks for the replies. I really appreciate the help.

I figured that most of them would be compatible but I just wanted to be sure. I am probably going to buy it for her sometime this week. One last thing I could use some help with though. I forgot to mention this in my original post but I'm planning on putting some multimedia on it before I send it to her. However, I don't have a MAC of any kind outside of my iPhone and iPod so I'm not sure if that will be a problem or not since I'll be doing the formatting and transferring of files on a PC. Also, I'd like to format it to NTFS over FAT32 because I'm sure some files will be larger than 4GB that she'll want to have stored on it.

So I guess basically would it be possible for me to format (in NTFS) and transfer the files via my PC than have it work on her MacBook? What drivers would she need in order to use the hard drive formatted in NTFS or is that something that will be specific to the HDD? She isn't the most tech savvy person when it comes to computers. So if it is possible to do what I'm asking but might be a little involved or something I could probably just wait until she comes home next.

LOL. I hope that made sense. I am pretty tired typing this right now. Also, I will probably just post whatever my potential choices are here just to be certain.

Thanks.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

She'll need to install NTFS-3G to write to NTFS drives. Used to be free, latest versions aren't tho. Below link should still be free.
NTFS-3G for Mac OS X: NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2009.11.14

Pretty straightforward install, just a dmg.