Using Seagate backup plus desktop drive with OS 10.4.11

The 10.6 requirement could be for some bundled backup software that comes with the drive. Those backup apps are often troublemakers. The drive should still be recognized.

However, there is good reason to get another product. Many "name brand" external drives/enclosures that go on sale every other week at the office superstores simply don't play well with Macs. Too often they have only a USB connenction and older eMacs don't have fast USB. You are better off to get something with FireWire ports for two reasons:

<> FW400 is functionally much faster than USB2, and light-years ahead of USB1.1.

<> Any PowerPC Mac can boot from an external FireWire drive but not from a USB drive.

To see if your eMac has USB1.1 or USB2, do "About this Mac" from your Apple menu and, in the resulting window, click the "More info...." button to launch System Profiler. Your should see a main Profiler sceen labeled "Hardware Overview," something like this:

The second line ("Machine Model" in OS 10.4) will have a code. It translates:

<> code "PowerMac4,4" has USB 1,1 ports and will be dreadfully slow with a USB-only drive

<> code "PowerMac6.4" has USB2 and would be acceptable for speed with a USB-only drive, but the USB drive would not be bootable.

After suffering with the "name brand drives" I now use only the drives from Other World Computing. See this page for their options in deaktop external drives:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB

The cheapest one with USB2 and FireWire 400 is all you need for an eMac, but you may consider one with FW800 if you plan to upgrade to a newer Mac in the future,

It's probably OK then. Few people here seem to find the FW drives without web-ordering, so you did well. You'll need a FW800-to-FW400 cable or similar cable adaptor fr the eMac but, at least with WD and OWC, they have supplied the correct cable and/or adaptor with the drive.

Here what the 800/400 cable looks like:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/1394B96012/

and this is the adaptor from the same site:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/FIR1369AD/

Some people have reformatted name-brand externals to remove their often kludgy back-up software and then use something good like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. The Mimeo-based back-up software that came with my WD external was not a team player, so I wiped the drive and put it in an OWC Mercury Elite enclosure--works fine now.

Hello All...I cracked it 🙂

here is how i managed it...

I bought Seagate Backup Plus-3TB today, I checked the mac logo for system requirement. When i brought it home I noticed the compatibility & it read OS X 10.6 or higher, it further said, backward compatible with USB 2.0 ports at USB 2.0 transfer speed. I too was in dillemma whether it was refering to USB speed alone or the device compatibility. When i tried to mount the disk it my mac a G5 ppc was not recognising it. I checked the disk info in Disk Uitility & it showed the file system to be MS-DOS. The disk could not be formatted & I assumed it would work only with intel based macs. I tried doing various stuff thru disk utility with out any success. Then i hit the jackpot. What u have to do is in the disk utility highlight the disk (not the volume) then click on the tab Partition, choose your disk name, in my case the format appeared automatically as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) the size window shows full capacity, now hit the tab Parition at the bottom. Let it run for about 10 minutes then Quit the disk utility leaving the partition unfinished. An alert sign will appear saying if you quit half way then the disk may not work properly. Don't worry just hit quit. Wait for few seconds & whuahh...the disk icon appears on ur desktop...with no partition & a single volume with full capacity. Give it a shot. Good Luck