Having trouble finding a USB drive that supports OS X El Capitan 10.11.6. Need recommendation asap please. Mac is early 2012.

Having trouble finding a USB drive that supports OS X El Capitan 10.11.6. Need recommendation asap please. Mac is early 2012.

iMac 21.5″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Sep 30, 2021 9:32 AM

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Posted on Sep 30, 2021 9:36 AM

Hello. Standard USB 2.0 or 3.0 thumb drives should be compatible with that release of OS X and your iMac. Are you running into an error while trying to plug in a standard flash drive? Newer flash drives may not list OS X 10.11.6 as a compatible version of OS X given its age, but they should still work as expected.

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Sep 30, 2021 9:36 AM in response to adriannefromlake charles

Hello. Standard USB 2.0 or 3.0 thumb drives should be compatible with that release of OS X and your iMac. Are you running into an error while trying to plug in a standard flash drive? Newer flash drives may not list OS X 10.11.6 as a compatible version of OS X given its age, but they should still work as expected.

Sep 30, 2021 10:57 AM in response to adriannefromlake charles

Hello. Time Machine stating that it needs to erase and reformat the LaCie drive is normal. What most likely happened is that the LaCie drive was formatted at the factory with a filesystem that is not compatible with Time Machine. Your Mac will need to reformat it to a supported filesystem type before it can be used for Time Machine backups. I would go ahead and erase and reformat the drive as requested by Time Machine and go from there. After doing so, it should work fine for your backups.

Sep 30, 2021 10:04 AM in response to Latranner

An error message appeared stating that the disk could not work on OS 10.11.6. The Mac did not recognize the disk in Disk Utility.


In the meantime I opened the package for the LaCie and am trying it. I can use the backup software included but I thought I'd try TimeMachine again. TimeMachine reports it needs to erase and reformat the LaCie. So it looks like it will work with the software LaCie includes, but not with TimeMachine. At lease not without reformatting. Your advice now? And thanks.

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Having trouble finding a USB drive that supports OS X El Capitan 10.11.6. Need recommendation asap please. Mac is early 2012.

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