Transcend external hard disk and Mac book Pro

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Level 1

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Transcend external hard disk and Mac book Pro

Hi

I recently acquired a MAC book Pro and this being my first APPLE product - I am still learning lots abt this notebook.

My question pertains to using an external hard disk in the MAC book Pro. I have a transcend external hard drive that works on the mac book pro - without my having formatted it etc. It also works on a windows system. ( I have as yet only used it to access documents that were previosly stored in the external hard disk)

Can I continue using the hard disk as -is or would I still need to format the disk to make it MAC book pro friendly??

Thanks in advance 🙂

Vidya

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jun 12, 2012 7:14 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Limnos

Level 10

428,147 points

Jun 12, 2012 7:19 AM in response to Vidiwoo

Typically new hard drives, or ones that have been used with Windows, are formatted to NTFS. Macs can read but not write to NTFS. Are you sure the drive is fully functional with your Mac? If you format a drive to Mac format you will find it does not work with windows unless you buy third party software to enable it. Likewise, you have to use third party software to get NTFS to fully work on Macs. The only format that really works with both without additional support is FAT, but there are many limitations to using this pretty old formatting system. There's no ideal solution for dual use and it would help to have more details as to what you intend to do with this drive. I use a Flash drive for dual use but I leave it as FAT since I don't need to copy on huge files.

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Answer 2

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,329 points

Jun 12, 2012 7:27 AM in response to Vidiwoo

Have you tried downloading to the disk? A PC HDD will let you look at the contents but not write to it. If you cannot write to it, you will have to reformat it via Disk Utility. In order to use on both PC and Mac use MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT and for Mac only, Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Ciao.

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