how to format a wd external hard drive for mac

The microUSB and AC sockets are closely spaced with a small white indicator light besides them. Looks matter to me, even if it just an external drive. The top and bottom panels have a matte finish. All black, the sides are fingerprint magnets with a glossy finish. That said, let us talk about the performance of these drives –ġ) Build and form factor – Nice sleek looking enclosures. I got 3TB worth of storage for the price of a 2TB External hard drive! Yes, two! (My work requires that kind of storage space)

WOW! I was amazed at the price Amazon was offering these drives and I got two of them. I wasn’t really happy with the prices I was seeing for the 2TB hard drive, and that is when I decided to check up on the 1.5TB drives. I was in need for added storage and wanted to go for the 2TB WD Elements External Hard Drive. This is a great external hard drive for expanding your digital storage capacity. I just did this with the new Seagate FreeAgent 1.5 TB external. I find that I need to do this with Maxtor and Seagate Free Agent drives also. Interestingly, it’s not unique to Western Digital drives. Update (): It’s amazing, but this continues to be one of the most popular posts on this blog. I’m now ready to try out Apple Time Machine for the first time… I’m posting it here just in case it saves the day for someone else. In any case, there is an Apple Discussion Board thread that saved the day for me. Why Apple doesn’t communicate this error intelligibly when you attempt to format I don’t know. Once you get to that magic dialog, it’s pretty clear what to do. Flipping it to GUID or Apple Partition Map will work. It turns out, if the boot record scheme is set to “Master Boot Record”, you will not be able to format it as Mac OS Extended. The solution: If you go to the partition map and click the “Options…” button, you’ll be able to select which scheme to use for the boot records. The problem: When you try to reformat in Disk Utility, you’ll get a very cryptic error that says that there was an unknown error with the partition map.

Of course, if you are using it with a Mac, then you’ll want to reformat it using Mac OS Extended (HFS+). When you buy a Western Digital (WD) 1 TB My Book External Hard Drive, they usually come formatted for Windows using FAT32.

How to format a wd external hard drive for mac