External Harddisk Question

epoxy5 · 6 May 2008 at 06:05

Well I just ordered the updated 24" iMac and I am really looking forward to this. I have wanted to do this for ages, but never had the nerves to press the buy button.

Well this morning it happened and as I am a soon to be mac owner I have a million questions

In terms of external hard disks I reckon the normal MyBooks will work ok?

But is it possible to make your own external hard disks with some sort of enclosure and some normal sata drives?

I have a couple of HD's I would love to make into Mac useable backup drives, just not sure if it's possible.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance
Thomas

memyselfandi · 6 May 2008 at 06:21

In general it is possible to do this but I, and my colleagues, have found that you do need to do a bit of research beforehand as sometimes the Mac will not want to partition, (and format .... can't remember if this was also an issue), the drive in the enclosure whilst it was usable once that was done.

edit: I think the above is due to the chipset being used in the external caddy. I know that old Akasa PATA caddies used to be ok but the PATA Icyboxes gave us issues. There is one manufacturer you made a box that looked very like a Mac Mini (I can't say who as they have a web shop which could be classed as a competitor). Once the disk was partitioned then it could be moved to one of the other caddies and formated HFS+ or whatever.

epoxy5 · 6 May 2008 at 06:44

Cheers I will research a little then... But I reckon there will be a lot of other stuff to research once I get it

Will_3rd · 6 May 2008 at 07:53

most drives will be OK, but if you want read and write access they will be need to be formatted as FAT32 or HFS+. As Mac OSX out of the box only has NTFS read only access.

epoxy5 · 6 May 2008 at 16:33

Will_3rd said:
most drives will be OK, but if you want read and write access they will be need to be formatted as FAT32 or HFS+. As Mac OSX out of the box only has NTFS read only access.

Ok thanks... should I format the HD's on the Mac or do it on the PC before I use 'em? Probably a stupid question, but I suddenly feel like such a noob

itsallaboutyou · 6 May 2008 at 17:16

epoxy5 said:
Ok thanks... should I format the HD's on the Mac or do it on the PC before I use 'em? Probably a stupid question, but I suddenly feel like such a noob

Just do it on the mac

I've had no problem doing it! (although in the end it was a waste of time 'cos I bought time capsule!)

A work colleague has the 1tb mybook studio and he loves it