External Hard Drive for MacBook Pro

PootleFlump_3

Can anyone recommend the above for me please. Its for my OH as a gift and I know nothing about computers (particularly Macs). Dont want to spend more than around £70. Ive done a search on here but the posts are mainly computer jargon which I dont understand.

He has a macbook pro and I think I will need one that is 500GB or 1TB as he takes loads of photos and think he will need quite a bit of space.

If anyone can recommend one it would be really appreciated. Think I need one with a firewall from what Ive already read on here. Thanks in advance.

Inner_Zone

You don't need a Firewall for an external HDD, it just plugs in to a USB port or do you mean Firewire?

Seagate and WD are usually OK but I have just today returned one of each manufactures drives for warranty exchange. Also have Toshiba but that's a WD drive inside anyway.

fireice

External hard drives don't have firewalls

You need to decide if you want a 2.5" "portable" drive or a 3.5" "desktop" drive

The difference is that portable ones won't need to be connected to a power supply whereas the desktops ones need to be

PootleFlump_3

Oops, maybe it was firewire. (told you I know nothing about computers)

I just want one that plugs into a USB port and if possible one that works on a mac or a pc so I can use it too.

fireice

You could look at something like this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/171922

It's usb only and already formatted for a mac, I think you'll struggle to find a 1TB portable drive for less than £70

jayme1

most external hard drives come preformatted for the OS but otherwise are identical, if you buy one preformatted in NTFS for windows and want to only use it in a mac then the first time you connect it to the mac just simply reformat it to the mac format (vid how to).

if you want to use the hard drive on both mac and windows then the drive will need to be formatted to FAT32 to do this you will need to use a utility the hard drive manufacturer provides.

say if you buy this hard drive it comes in preformatted for windows to be able to use it on both OSs you need to format it to FAT32 using this utility from the western digital website, simple.

I personally would just buy the cheapest size of drive you can find regardless of what it is preformatted in, because as I have found ones preformatted for a mac tend to be more expensive than their identical windows counterparts.

also format the drive to which format you require before you put any data on the drive, after you have data on the drive it is not that feasible to change formats.