It's probably no different hardware-wise, just already formatted for the Mac. There's a whole pile of people who still think Macs need special everything, so the companies take advantage of that to fleece them out of an extra £20. In general, you don't need special Mac-only hardware stuff anymore. Hard drives, RAM, peripherals, etc. Are all fairly generally universally compatible; even the stuff that's generally seen as 'Mac' (i.e., FireWire and now Thunderbolt) is Windows- and Linux-compatible and will generally work fine. EDIT: I guess I can think of one good reason to buy a pre-formatted 'Mac' drive: if the user is not someone who is comfortable formatting disks.
To format an external drive on a Mac: Open Finder and go to /Applications/Utilities and double-click on Disk Utility. Select your drive in the left-hand sidebar and go to the Erase tab. May 5, 2016 - Many external hard drives come pre-formatted as FAT 32. This is a native Windows file format that can be read by Mac OS X, but is not ideal for.
On the other hand, Disk Utility is sufficiently straightforward I've walked my parents through formatting drives a couple of times over the phone, so I wouldn't waste the money. This is likely the case 99% of the time. External hard drive compatibility rests mostly on the file system (HFS+ for Mac, NTFS for Windows, EXT3 for Linux, etc.). Cross compatibility rests on the OS itself (and additional plugins).
But sometimes, the units themselves, which carry proprietary firmware for the controller, may vary. Some WD external units don't play nice with OS X power settings (Mac's use the pmset utility to set things like HD spindown and sleep time). So while it may be just a case of petty 'fleecing,' it doesn't hurt to hit up Google and double check compatibility.
– user10355 Mar 19 '12 at 23:13. There is no benefit to purchasing a Macintosh formatted drive because it is trivial to reformat the drive yourself using Disk Utility. Open Disk Utility. Select your new disk from the panel on the left.
Select the disk, not the partition which appears below it. Click on the Partition tab on the right. Important if you plan to use this as a bootable drive, select Options (under the Partition Layout section) and choose a GUID partition map (assuming you're using Intel based Macs.). Select the Format which is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) unless you know the specific reason why you're using something else. I would also leave the drive as a single partition unless you have a clear idea about why you're not doing so. Click on Apply. There are some advantages of the HFS+ journaled file system that Apple uses.
It works better with the Mac OS, so if you are not sharing the drive with wintel machines, go with the Mac format. I am currently attempting to format a Western Digital 4 Tb drive, but because of the default Windows settings, the drive appears in Disk Utility as a 2 Gb drive. I cannot seem to find how to rectify the situation - the WD documentation for the Mac is terrible! Maybe it is a jumper setting of some sort. This might be a reason to go with a drive that is already formatted for Mac, even apart from Firewire ports and all that. I am a longtime Mac user and have reformatted tens of drives in my time, so normally I would say just buy a generic drive and reformat it.
But this WD experience is annoying and it is related to Microsoft's 2 Tb limit. We all end up paying for their mediocrity and lack of foresight. So if you are a mac user, you might spare yourself some headaches. This.isn't a thing.
Disk Utility does not rely on any 'default Windows settings' to determine the capacity of a disk. The disk might be pre-formatted with two 2 TB partitions, in which case you'd just need to erase it and format it as one 4 TB partition (if that's what you want), but as a long-time Mac user I've never had a problem with external drives and I generally only buy Western Digital, and never the Mac-specific ones.
There are no jumpers on them (at least not user-accessible). – Oct 21 '16 at 4:11.
Back Up the Drive’s Data First First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it. This process won’t actually convert the file system. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. Any files on the drive will be erased. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files. If you only have Windows systems available, you can use to copy files from the drive onto your Windows system drive or another drive. HFSExplorer unfortunately requires you install Java to use it, but it’s the only free option here.
You’ll probably want to. Erase the Mac Partitions, Including the EFI System Partition RELATED: First, open the. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, type diskmgmt.msc into the box, and press Enter to open it. This tool allows you to manage the partitions on drives connected to your computer — internal ones or external ones connected via USB. Locate the Mac drive in the list of disks. Be sure you’ve identified the Mac drive — if you accidentally delete partitions from another drive, you could damage your Windows installation or lose your files.
If you’re lucky, you can just right-click each partition on the Mac drive and select Delete Volume to remove the partitions. You can then right-click in the empty space and select New Simple Volume to create a partition and format it with the Windows NTFS or FAT32 file systems. The Mac drive may have an “EFI System Partition” on it. This partition is marked as protected, so you can’t just right-click and delete it — the delete option will be disabled. To erase this partition, we’ll have to wipe the entire disk.
This process erases everything on the disk, including its files and all its partitions. First, note the number of the disk in the disk management window. For example, in the screenshot below, the Mac-formatted drive is Disk 2.
Next, open a Command Prompt window as administrator. To do this on Windows 8 or Windows 7, press the Windows key once, type cmd, and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Type diskpart into the Command Prompt window and press Enter. Type list disk at the DISKPART prompt and press Enter to view a list of disks connected to your computer. Identify the number of your Mac disk in the list. It should be the same as the number of the disk in the Disk Management window. Be sure to double-check this — you could accidentally wipe the wrong drive if you select the wrong disk here.
Type select disk # and press Enter to select the Mac disk, replacing # with the number of the Mac disk. For example, here we’d type select disk 2.
Finally, type clean and press Enter. This command erases the entire selected disk, including all its files and partitions — whether they’re protected or not. You’ll have an empty, uninitialized disk after you do this. Close the Command Prompt window when you see a message saying “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.” Create an NTFS or FAT32 Partition You can now open the Disk Management window again. If you’ve left it open, you may have to click Action Rescan Disks to update the data.
Locate the Mac disk in the list. It will be completely empty and display a message saying “Not Initialized.” Right-click it and select Initialize Disk.
Select the and click OK to create a partition table for the disk. Right-click in the unallocated space on the initialized disk and select New Simple Volume.
Use the wizard to create a partition with the. The drive will now be formatted for use by Windows systems. There will be no space wasted by protected Mac partitions.
Some Mac functions require an HFS+ formatted drive. For example, can only back up to HFS+ formatted drives.
Image Credit.