Soon to be Apple iMac User has a question about External HD

justin24justin24
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I have been a PC user all my life but I am switching to Apple due to the nature of my photo business. I have 3 external hard drives which I have been using for a few years now. I have read that the imac will read the drives but I can't write to them. Could I transfer my files over to the imacs hard drive and then reformat the drives? Does Apple use Fat32 to be able to read and write?



Any help would be appreciated.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    tarltarl Posts: 41member
    Mac OS X can read, but not write to, NTFS formatted drives. Drives formatted FAT32 are both readable and writable.



    So, if your drives are currently NTFS, you will need to transfer the data and then reformat the drives.

    If they are FAT32, you can leave them as is.



    In either case, you may want to reformat the drives anyways. If you plan to only use them with Macs, format them Mac OS Extended. If you to use them with Macs, Windows, Linux, etc, FAT32 will work, but with a performance penalty.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    There are four main ways of getting MacOS X to be able to use NTFS volume read/write:



    1) The open-source NTFS-3G for Macintosh project



    2) A commercial version of that same project.



    3) Paragon software's NTFS for Macintosh



    4) Enabling the read/write support built into MacOS X as in this article



    The first one is free, the next two commercial, and the last has no guarantee that it is bug-free.
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