My current Mac desktop runs on Mac OS X-10.5.8 Safari.Are there any brand name external hard drives still compatible with this “obsolete” operating system? Thanks.
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Robert
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External Hard Drive/OS Compatibility.
Comments: 3 Responses to “External Hard Drive/OS Compatibility.”
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External hard drives are not "compatible" with an OS. They are compatible with a file system. For instance, "Mac OS Extended" or "MS-DOS FAT."
For a Mac, what you need is a drive that can be initialized as "Mac OS Extended" (also known as HFS). That's pretty much any drive you can get. The file system hasn't changed much throughout the lifetime of OS X.
If you see a drive that claims you need a specific operating system, like "requires Windows 7" or "requires OS X 10.6" then it is probably referring to some add-on software that is included with the drive.
This is less common now, but it used to be that name brand hard drive manufacturers would include backup, archiving or some other software with the drive. For the most part you would just erase that and re-initialize the drive and use it normally. So the OS requirement wasn't important.
I run a few PPC Macs that use OS 10.5.8 (Leopard) Most external hard drives will work with them, however there can be issues with some Western Digital units.
I can tell you now WD have the Mac hard drive straight out of the box,but i made the mistake for not asking for this I thought he knew. I got the one where you had to partition it.
I hadn`t a clue how i did it. This made me look at other makes of external hard drives. I wished i did this first. You mentioned erase that did not make sense to me,but i erased it,and it`s still working with no problems at all.Gary