External Hard drive with MacBook Pro

guitarist970guitarist970
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hey everyone, I'm completely new to the mac world but I'm buying a macbook pro later this week and wanted to ask this:



If I were to yank the hard drive out of my current windows based laptop and put it in an external 2.5'' hard drive enclosure will the macbook pro be able to read it? I thought this might be an easy way to transfer all my music and files from my current laptop to my new one as well as setting me up with a nice portable hard drive as well.



I'd appreciate any input.



Thanks.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    tulkastulkas Posts: 3,757member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Guitarist970 View Post


    Hey everyone, I'm completely new to the mac world but I'm buying a macbook pro later this week and wanted to ask this:



    If I were to yank the hard drive out of my current windows based laptop and put it in an external 2.5'' hard drive enclosure will the macbook pro be able to read it? I thought this might be an easy way to transfer all my music and files from my current laptop to my new one as well as setting me up with a nice portable hard drive as well.



    I'd appreciate any input.



    Thanks.



    Should work fine.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    kareliakarelia Posts: 525member
    The transfer will go fine, but once you get everything that's important, you'll want to reformat the PC's drive, because NTFS is read-only on a Mac.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    kmac1036kmac1036 Posts: 281member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Karelia View Post


    The transfer will go fine, but once you get everything that's important, you'll want to reformat the PC's drive, because NTFS is read-only on a Mac.



    Natively, this is correct. There is some open source drivers that work with MacFuse from google dev.



    Firewire is the best way to go, USB works too. Just about any case you find on newegg.com should work, make sure the internal interface matches your drive you have.



    HFS+ is much more stable and reliable than the MS formats, so don't be afraid to use it.
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