Do all external hard drives work with my macbook pro?

Question

Do all external hard drives work with my macbook pro?

I just bought an HP Simplesave external hard drive. On the rear of the package, I noticed its compatible with XP, Vista, and 7, but nothing about Mac. I don't want to open it, but I was under the assumption that all external hard drives work on all systems. I didn't think they were operating system specific.

Anyone know about this specific hard drive, and about hard drives in general if my assumption is correct?

2.4 Unibody Macbook Pro - 4 GB Ram 250GB 5600RPM HD, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Dec 28, 2009 1:23 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 28, 2009 1:29 PM in response to Nuclear Winter

For the most part most drives will work once properly formatted. Often, though, the included software is Windows only. Unless it specifically says Mac compatible it is generally a good idea to avoid the drive altogether.

You may want to do a Google search and see whether or not anyone has any feedback about that specific drive.

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Answer 2

eww

Level 9

53,052 points

Dec 28, 2009 2:13 PM in response to Nuclear Winter

The drive should work fine once you've reformatted it for the Mac, but whatever small portion of the purchase price went to cover the included software will be wasted, because HP will only have included Windoze software with it. And in the unlikely event that you ever need to call HP tech support, they'll be clueless about anything involving a Mac. These are the two reason why DP suggests avoiding drives whose makers don't mention anything about use with Macs.

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Answer 3

Dec 28, 2009 7:54 PM in response to Nuclear Winter

Thanks for the imput! How do I reformat the drive? How hard is it?

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Answer 4

Dec 29, 2009 2:47 AM in response to Nuclear Winter

Use the program Disk Utility. Select the hard drive and format it Mac OSX Extended. Then you must create at least one partition.

You may find the Disk Utility help menu useful.

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