Hard Drive compatibility with Mac

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 12:55pm #1

I have been looking at the Western Digital My Book and I noticed there is a Mac edition aswell, I am running parallels and would i be able to save stuff from that partition with just the mac edition or would I have to get the normal edition, also would I be able to run time machine on the normal my book or would it have to be the mac edition.

Thanks

yoyo · 31-03-2010 12:57pm

Get the cheaper one, format to FAT32, problem solved

Nick

Sad Professor · 31-03-2010 12:58pm

The "Mac edition" is the exact same as the regular edition, except it has a firewire port and comes pre-formatted as HFS+. Unless you want the Firewire port don't bother with it.

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 1:01pm

Thanks for the quick reply guys!

nialler · 31-03-2010 3:33pm

I've a Wester Digital MyBook Pro 2tb, although a good drive the fan noise is unbelievable, I now unmount it from the desktop just to keep the damn thing quiet, then off it goes itself on one and runs the fans at full afterburner. Check out reviews and the fan noise if any on that model.

edit: I've already installed the firmware update for the WD, didn't work.

Sad Professor · 31-03-2010 3:38pm

nialler wrote: »

I've a Wester Digital MyBook Pro 2tb, although a good drive the fan noise is unbelievable, I now unmount it from the desktop just to keep the damn thing quiet, then off it goes itself on one and runs the fans at full afterburner. Check out reviews and the fan noise if any on that model.

edit: I've already installed the firmware update for the WD, didn't work.

I've had a few MyBooks in the past and didn't find them too bad. The 2TB probably needs the extra cooling though. Placing them on non-hard surface might help to absorb the vibrations. I use an old mouse pad.

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 4:01pm

Just back from PcWorld were I got the My Book Essential 1TB, I think I set it up right, went into disk utility and set up 3 partitions, 1.Time Machine Backup, 2. Snow Leopard and 3. Windows, does that set up seem ok, The time machine is backing up my files now, it is 81.26GB which I suppose will take a while, slight noise like a fuzzy sound but not very loud, I presume it is just the fans while time machine is backing up! Does the set up with the 3 partitions seem ok

Sad Professor · 31-03-2010 4:27pm

If you are planning to boot OS X off it, make sure the partition table is GUID and not Apple Partition Map. It won't work otherwise.

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 4:30pm

Sorry could you explain what you said, I have no idea what that means

Thanks

Sad Professor · 31-03-2010 4:34pm

Open Disk Utility, click on the external drive and look at the info at the bottom. Where it says "Partition map scheme", what does it say?

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 4:36pm

It says GUID Partition Table.

Sad Professor · 31-03-2010 4:38pm

That's grand then, all good.

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 4:39pm

Thanks, You have been really helpful.

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 4:47pm

Sorry about this but I have one more question!

Should I leave the hard drive on all the time?

grizzly · 31-03-2010 4:58pm

Sorry about this but I have one more question!

Should I leave the hard drive on all the time?

Depends how you setup time machine. If you're doing work on it and have important files that go through multiple changes every day you should have TM set you automatically back up your changes every hour (it's default setting). This way if your HD dies on you, you only lose an hours work. If you're just keeping a backup of films/music/photos you can manually backup every couple of days and leave it unplugged.

I leave mine on when booted for convenience. My TM is set to backup to a separate internal HD.

Also, I wouldn't bother have two partitions Mac/Windows. Just Time Machine/everything else and let folders take care of the rest. This allows for flexibility when you would have exceeded the size of one of the smaller partitions.

Nemanja91 · 31-03-2010 5:22pm

grizzly wrote: »

Depends how you setup time machine. If you're doing work on it and have important files that go through multiple changes every day you should have TM set you automatically back up your changes every hour (it's default setting). This way if your HD dies on you, you only lose an hours work. If you're just keeping a backup of films/music/photos you can manually backup every couple of days and leave it unplugged.

I leave mine on when booted for convenience. My TM is set to backup to a separate internal HD.

Also, I wouldn't bother have two partitions Mac/Windows. Just Time Machine/everything else and let folders take care of the rest. This allows for flexibility when you would have exceeded the size of one of the smaller partitions.

Is there no point in having a windows and snow leopard partition so, if i just had a time machine backup partition would that cover everything

grizzly · 31-03-2010 5:37pm

Yes, it's a good idea to have a partition with TM and another for everything else. The reason for this is that;

1) if you had no partitions TM would fill your whole drive until it's full (there's no way to tell it to just take x amount without this).

2) TM will only interact with your Mac files – you'll still have to find another solution for Windows backups.

Hard Drive compatibility with Mac

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