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Question

WD MY BOOK ESSENTIAL 3TB

Aug 17, 2012 4:35AM PDT

I just bought a WD My Book Essential 3TB hard drive and want to use on both my mac book pro (mac os x lion) and my pc laptop (windows 7). I mainly want to use it to store pictures and music. I understand I have to reformat it for the mac, but I am having problems seeing the files on the pc. Any suggestions???

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: externa; disks
Aug 17, 2012 4:48AM PDT

If you want that both the mac and the pc are able to read and write each others files, you should make one or more FAT32 partitions on the drive.

If it's OK to reserve (say) half for use on the PC and the other half for use on the Mac, and it's NOT necessary that they can access the files of the other machine (not even for transferring files between PC and Mac) you could make a Mac formatted partition (for use by the Mac) and a NTFS partition (for use by the PC).

Of course, you can combine it also: 1 Mac-partition for the Mac, 1 NTFS partition for the PC and 1 FAT32 partition that both can use. It's totally your choice depending on how you plan to use that disk.

One note: external hard disks shouldn't be used to STORE data. They aren't reliable enough so sooner or later you'll lose everything you didn't store elsewhere also. An external disk is (only) good for backing up data from the internal hard disk of your Mac and PC (that's a copy, just in case something happens with the original) and to transfer files between machines that aren't networked. But NOT as the only place to store data. Of course, you can buy the music again, if it's lost, but that's more difficult with your own pictures.

Kees


Kees

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Thanks
Aug 17, 2012 7:03AM PDT

Thanks for your reply....I just spoke with WD techs and they just told me the 3TB does not support what I want to do. So I have to get the 2 TB hard drive. Thank you for your reply and help though. Let me ask you this. Between my wife and I, we have ALOT of pictures and music. All of mine are on 2 other hard drives and hers are on a Mac desktop that crashed and we have to pull the internal hard drive. We would like to know the best way to store all the music and pictures and be able to access them with both our mac book pro and our pc. What do you recommend.

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Before worrying about being able to view them on two machine
Aug 17, 2012 8:26AM PDT

I would strongly advise you to start the process of putting them all onto as many DVD's as it takes to hold them all.
Store them somewhere safe, a safe deposit box would be good, and then start thinking about the best way to view them on two machine.

Personally, I would take the 2TB external drive and format it as NTFS.
Then purchase a copy of NTFS for Mac from Paragon Software. This will enable to Mac to read and write to the NTFS formatted disk. Of course, the PC can already do that.

Now you can swap the drive from one machine to the other without a problem.

What was it that you wanted to do with the 3TB drive that it wouldn't do?

P