External hard drives

pacaseypacasey
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Will I be able to partition an external hard drive, so a portion of it can be used with time machine and the other portion with my PC or other files?



Any recomendations on 1tb or larger External hard drives ... Toms Hardware had a good write up on SimpleTech Prodrive?



http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rive,2045.html

thanks ...

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    futurepastnowfuturepastnow Posts: 1,772member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by pacasey View Post


    Will I be able to partition an external hard drive, so a portion of it can be used with time machine and the other portion with my PC or other files?



    Any recomendations on 1tb or larger External hard drives ... Toms Hardware had a good write up on SimpleTech Prodrive?



    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rive,2045.html

    thanks ...



    Of course. You can use the Disk Utility in OS X to partition an external just like an internal drive. Create an HFS+ (which without looking I think OSX calls "Mac OS Extended-Journaled") partition with Disk Utility, and it can also create a FAT32 partition if that's what you want the rest of the disk to be.



    FAT32 sucks, though, and if you want a chunk of the disk to be NTFS, I think you will have to create/format that partition in Windows. Which isn't too difficult- go to computer management, then disk management, right-click on the "unallocated space" of your new drive, and click on new partition. Make it a primary partition. Then right click on the new partition and select format.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    pacaseypacasey Posts: 4member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by FuturePastNow View Post


    Of course. You can use the Disk Utility in OS X to partition an external just like an internal drive. Create an HFS+ (which without looking I think OSX calls "Mac OS Extended-Journaled") partition with Disk Utility, and it can also create a FAT32 partition if that's what you want the rest of the disk to be.



    FAT32 sucks, though, and if you want a chunk of the disk to be NTFS, I think you will have to create/format that partition in Windows. Which isn't too difficult- go to computer management, then disk management, right-click on the "unallocated space" of your new drive, and click on new partition. Make it a primary partition. Then right click on the new partition and select format.



    Thanks!
  • Reply 3 of 4
    zoolookzoolook Posts: 657member
    Be careful about NTFS, as it cannot be written to easily by OS X or other operating systems. FAT32 does indeed suck, it had virtually no security and fragments very easily, but almost any computer made after 1998 can read data from it, which is what's important.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    spinnerlysspinnerlys Posts: 218member
    You can use MacFuse and the NTFS-3G driver to write to an NTFS formatted volume/partition under Mac OS X.

    It's free by the way.
Sign In or Register to comment.