Best DVD & Blu-ray drives for Mac Pioneer BDR-XD05. Patuoxun USB 3.0 DVD Burner Drive. LG GP57EW40 DVD drive. Topelek External BluRay Drive. VicTsing Blu-Ray drive. The CD-ROM drive became standard on most computers sold to the general public by the early 1990s. The CD-ROM was capable of holding far more than the average floppy disc, and it became the popular choice for storing and accessing media files. The Best External Hard Drives for Mac in 2019. But what happens when you throw yet another variable into the mix: the connection between your drive and your Mac? As you might have guessed, the. You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine. However, if you want to use part of the drive for OS X's Time Machine backups, you should do this from the Mac, since there's. After you've enabled DVD or CD Sharing, you can use that computer's optical drive at any time. Insert a disc in the optical drive of the computer that's being shared. The disc should then be available on any Mac that's connected to the same network. On the Mac that doesn't have an optical drive, open a Finder window. When you connect a Mac-formatted drive to Windows, you’ll be informed that “you need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it.” Don’t click the “Format disk” button or Windows will erase the contents of the drive–click “Cancel”! This message appears because Windows doesn’t understand Apple’s HFS+ file system.
So, you just bought an external hard drive or a portable SSD and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive.
That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. Apple Mac machines support a different file system.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set.
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Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like Data Rescue to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary.
Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine – a 2TB Seagate Expansion. I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I’ll also show you how to do that below.
Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS
During the last several years, I’ve used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others.
Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see those High Sierra issues I encountered).
When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this.
When I opened it, the default content was all there. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”.
It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac.
I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. It showed this format:
Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here; you can read more on Wikipedia. The problem is that on macOS, you can’t work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app Paragon NTFS for Mac.
How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)?
Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5. They might be different if your Mac has a different version.
Step 1: Open Disk Utility.
The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
Step 2: Highlight your external drive and click “Erase”.
Make sure your drive is connected. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below.
Step 3: Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in Format.
A new window will pop up asking which file system you’d like to format the external drive to. By default, it’s the Windows NT File System (NTFS). Select the one shown below.
Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select “ExFAT”. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread.
By the way, you can also rename your external drive.
Step 4: Wait until the erasing process is complete.
For me, it took less than a minute to format my 2TB Seagate Expansion.
You can also check to see if the format was successful. Right-click on the icon for your external drive on Mac desktop, then select “Get Info”. Under “Format”, you should see text like this:
Congratulations! Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want.
How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac
If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Highlight your drive and click “Partition” in Disk Utility.
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Open the Disk Utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Make sure you select the disk icon right under “External”. If you select the one below it, the Partition option will be greyed out and become unclickable.
Step 2: Add partitions and allocate volume for each one.
After clicking “Partition”, you’ll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add “+” button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition. You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around.
After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it.
Step 3: Confirm your operation.
Once you hit “Apply”, a new window pops up asking for your confirmation. Take a few seconds to read the text description to make sure it reflects what you intend to do, then click the “Partition” button to continue.
Step 4: Wait until it says “Operation successful.”
To check whether the operation is really successful, go to your Mac desktop. You should see multiple disk icons show up. I chose to create two partitions on my Seagate Expansion — one for backup, the other for personal use. You can find more info in this post: How to Backup Mac to an External Hard Drive.
That wraps up this tutorial article. I hope you find it helpful. As always, let me know if you have any issues during the formatting or partitioning process.
Developer | Apple Computer |
---|---|
Type | Disk Drive |
Release date | May 4, 1984 |
Introductory price | US$495 |
The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original of a series of external 31⁄2-inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple would unify their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name 'Macintosh' from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard 51⁄4-inch flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new 31⁄2-inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line. Apple produced only one external 31⁄2-inch drive exclusively for use with the Apple II series called the Apple UniDisk 3.5.
- 2800K
- 31.44MB
400K[edit]
The original Macintosh External Disk Drive (M0130) was introduced with the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. However, it did not actually ship until May 4, 1984, sixty days after Apple had promised it to dealers. Bill Fernandez was the project manager who oversaw the design and production of the drive.[1] The drive case was designed to match the Macintosh and included the same 400-kilobyte drive (a Sony-made 31⁄2-inch single-sided mechanism) installed inside the Macintosh. Although very similar to the 400-kilobyte drive which newly replaced Apple's ill-fated Twiggy drive in the Lisa, there were subtle differences relating mainly to the eject mechanism. However, confusingly all of these drives were labelled identically. The Macintosh could only support one external drive, limiting the number of floppy disks mounted at once to two, but both Apple and third party manufacturers developed external hard drives that connected to the Mac's floppy disk port, which had pass-through ports to accommodate daisy-chaining the external disk drive. Apple's Hard Disk 20 could accommodate an additional daisy-chained hard drive as well as an external floppy disk.
3.5-inch single-sided floppies had been used on several microcomputers and synthesizers in the early 1980s, including the Hewlett Packard 150 and various MSX computers. The standard on all of these was MFM with 80 tracks and 9 sectors per track, giving 360 kB per disk. However, Apple's custom interface used Group Coded Recording (GCR) and a unique format which put fewer sectors on the smaller inner tracks and more sectors on the wider outer tracks of the disk. The disk would speed up when accessing the inner tracks and slow down when accessing the outer ones. This allowed more space per disk (400 kB) and also improved reliability by reducing the number of sectors on the inner tracks which had less physical media to allocate to each sector.
The external 400-kilobyte Macintosh drive will work on any Macintosh that does not have a high density SuperDrive controller (due to electrical changes with the interface), but the disks in practice only support the MFS file system. Although a 400-kilobyte disk may be formatted with HFS, it cannot be booted from, nor is it readable in a Mac 128/512.
Copy protection schemes were not as elaborate or widespread on Macintosh software as they were on Apple II software for several reasons. First, the Mac drives did not afford the same degree of low-level control. Also Apple did not publish source listings for the Mac OS ROMs as they did with the Apple II. Finally, the Mac OS routines were considerably more complex and disk access had to be synchronized with the mouse and keyboard.
800K[edit]
By early 1985, it was clear that the Macintosh needed additional storage space, in particular a hard drive. Apple announced their first hard drive for the Mac in March 1985. However, the MFS file system did not support subdirectories, making it unsuitable for a hard disk. Apple quickly began adopting for the Mac the hierarchical based SOS filing system introduced with the Apple III and long since implemented in ProDOS for the Apple II series and the Lisa. This change in the Mac's filing system delayed the introduction of the double sided Sony drives which Apple intended to offer as soon as the technology was available, a concession they made when adopting the Sony drives over their own problematic double-capacity Twiggy drives.[2][3] However, based on the success of the 3.5-inch floppy drive for the Mac, there was no such obstacle in immediately implementing an 800-kilobyte drive for the Apple II, so it was introduced in September 1985, four months before the version for the Mac. While Apple simultaneously introduced their new hard drive after a 6-month delay, they chose not to implement the new floppy drive for the Macintosh at that time.
Apple UniDisk 3.5[edit]
In September 1985, Apple released its first 31⁄2-inch drive (A2M2053) for the Apple II series utilizing Sony's new 800-kilobyte double-sided drive mechanism which would not be released for the Macintosh until 4 months later. The Apple UniDisk 3.5 drive contained additional circuitry making it an 'intelligent' or 'smart' drive; this made it incompatible with the Macintosh, despite having the identical mechanism that was to be later used in the Macintosh drive. However, if the internal circuit board (which consisted of its own CPU, IWM chip, RAM and firmware) was bypassed it could operate on a Macintosh as an 800-kilobyte drive.[4] This permitted storage-hungry Mac users the ability to double their disk capacity 5 months before Apple officially made an 800-kilobyte drive available for the Mac. Ironically, though the drive would prove to be significantly faster than the previous 400-kilobyte drive, it was specifically slowed down to accommodate the slower 1-megahertz processor of the Apple II. It came in the Snow White-styled case and color to match the Apple IIc and had a pass-through connector for the addition of a second daisy-chained drive. It plugged in directly to the Apple IIc disk port (although original IIcs needed a ROM upgrade) and required a specialized interface card on earlier Apple II models. It would later also work directly with the built-in disk port on the Apple IIc Plus and Apple IIGS through backwards compatibility. This was not recommended for the latter two machines as the Apple 3.5' Drive was faster. It continued to be sold for use with the Apple IIc and IIe which could not use the subsequent replacement Apple 31⁄2-inch drive, until the Apple IIc Plus redesign in 1988 and Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card released in 1991. Apple developed a DuoDisk 3.5 which contained two drives vertically stacked, but never brought it to market. The 31⁄2-inch format was not very popular in the Apple II community (excluding the 16-bit Apple IIGS) as most software was released in the 5.25-inch format to accommodate the existing installed Disk II drives.
Macintosh 800K External Drive[edit]
In January 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Plus which had a Sony double-sided 800-kilobyte capacity disk drive, and used the new HFS disk format providing directories and sub-directories. This drive was fitted into an external case as the Macintosh 800K External Drive (M0131), which was slimmer than the earlier 400-kilobyte drive. It could be used with Macintosh models except for the original 128K, which could not load the HFS disk format. The drive supported the older 400-kilobyte single-sided disks allowing them to be shared. The use of Apple's GCR with variable speed (as used on the 400-kilobyte drive) accommodated a higher storage capacity than its 720-kilobyte PC counterparts. In addition, the mechanism was much quieter and significantly faster than its predecessor. Designed primarily to run on Macs with the new 128-kilobyte ROM which contained the necessary code to support the drive, it could be used with Macs with older 64-kilobyte ROMs if the proper software was loaded from the system folder of a Hard Disk 20 into the Mac's RAM. The drive controlled its own speed and was no longer dependent on an external signal from the Mac, which was blocked on the early drive mechanisms compatible only with the Macintosh. Later universal mechanisms, first used on the Apple II to accommodate proprietary signals, required special cables to isolate the speed signal from the Mac, to prevent damage to the drive. However, with its increased storage capacity combined with 2-4 times the RAM available on the Mac Plus, the external drive was less of a necessity than it had been with its predecessors. Nevertheless, with the only option for adding additional storage being extremely expensive hard drives, a year later Apple increased the maximum number of floppy drives that could be accessed simultaneously to three on the Macintosh SE (the Macintosh Portable was the only other Mac to do so).
Disc Drive For Mac Book Pro
Apple 3.5' Drive[edit]
Beginning in September 1986, Apple adopted a unified cross-platform product strategy essentially eliminating platform-specific peripherals where possible. The Apple 3.5' Drive (A9M0106), is an 800K external drive released in conjunction with the Apple IIGS computer, and replaced the beige-colored Macintosh 800K External Drive. It works on both the Apple IIGS as well as the Macintosh. It came in a case similar to the UniDisk, but in Platinum gray. Like the UniDisk 3.5, the Apple 3.5' Drive includes Apple II-specific features such as a manual disk eject button and a daisy-chain connector which allows two drives to be connected to an Apple II computer. The Macintosh however could still only accommodate one external drive, and ignores use of the eject button. Unlike the Macintosh 800K External Drive, the Apple 3.5' Drive can be used natively with the 64-kilobyte ROM stock Macintosh 128K & 512K computers without the HD20 INIT, albeit only with 400K MFS formatted disks. Designed as a universal external drive replacement, the Apple 3.5' Drive was eventually made compatible with the remaining Apple II models in production upon the introduction of the Apple IIc Plus and the Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card for the Apple IIe.
1.44MB[edit]
Following the success of the Macintosh implementation of the 31⁄2-inch format, the format was also adopted widely by the personal computer industry. However most of the industry adopted a different Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) formatting scheme at a fixed rotational speed, incompatible with Apple's own GCR with variable speed, resulting in a less-expensive drive, but with a lower capacity (720 KB rather than 800 KB). In 1987 a newer and better, MFM-based, 'high-density' format was developed which IBM first introduced in their PS/2 systems, doubling the previous storage capacity to 1.4 MB. In Apple's pursuit of cross-compatibility with DOS and Windows-based systems to attract more business customers, they adopted the new format, thus confirming it as the first industry-wide floppy disk standard. However, Apple could not take advantage of the less expensive fixed-speed systems of the IBM-based computers, due to its backward incompatibility with their own variable-speed formats.
Apple FDHD Drive[edit]
Later renamed the Apple SuperDrive (G7287), the Apple FDHD Drive (Floppy Disk High Density) was introduced in 1989 as Apple's first external 1.44 MB high-density double-sided 31⁄2-inch floppy drive. It supported all of Apple's 3.5' floppy disk formats as well as all standard PC formats (e.g. MS-DOS, Windows), allowing the Macintosh to read and write all industry standard floppy disk formats. The external drive was offered only briefly with support for the Apple II, coming late in that product's life. To take advantage of the drive's extended storage and new capabilities, it required the new SWIM (Sander-Wozniak Integrated Machine) floppy disk controller chip to be present on the Macintosh and Apple II, the latter requiring the Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card which integrated the chip. If the drive was connected to an older Macintosh, Apple IIGS or Apple IIc Plus with the older IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) chip, the drive would act as a standard 800K drive, without any additional capabilities. The interface card was necessary for the Apple IIGS to make use of its greater storage capacity and ability to handle PC formats. The Apple IIe could not utilize the drive in any form, unless it had the specialized interface card installed, much like the UniDisk 3.5 which the SuperDrive replaced. The last Mac it could be used with was the Classic II and was discontinued shortly thereafter. The drive was fitted in every desktop Mac from its introduction and was eliminated with the introduction of the iMac in 1998. PowerPC Macs dropped the original auto-inject Sony drives and went to a manual inject mechanism.
Macintosh HDI-20 External 1.4MB Floppy Disk Drive[edit]
Manufactured exclusively for use with the Macintosh PowerBook line, the Macintosh HDI-20 External 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive (M8061) contained a low-powered, slimmer version of the SuperDrive and used a small square HDI-20[5] proprietary connector, rather than the larger standard DE-19 desktop connector, and was powered directly by the laptop. It had a matching dark gray case and an access cover which flipped down to form a stand. The external drive was sold optionally for those PowerBooks which had no built-in drive, however, the identical drive mechanism was included internally in some PowerBook models, which otherwise had no provision to accommodate an external drive.
Macintosh PowerBook 2400c Floppy Disk Drive[edit]
Compatible only with the PowerBook 2400c, the Macintosh PowerBook 2400c Floppy Disk Drive (M4327) used a unique Molex connector [6] rather than the previous HDI-20 connector. Possibly because of the 2400c's IBM design heritage, both the drive and computer use the same connectors as IBM ThinkPad external floppy drives from the same period; however, IBM drives are not electrically compatible.[7]The drive was discontinued in 1998, and would be the last external floppy drive manufactured by Apple.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^Bill Fernandez Portfolio
- ^MacTech Mousehole Vol 1, Issue 5, Letters, Rumor Mill at the Expo
- ^[1] Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Quick, Hide In This Closet!
- ^Naiman, Arthur (1987). The Macintosh Bible. Goldstein & Blair. p. 253. ISBN0-940235-00-5.
- ^HDI-20
- ^'PowerBook 2400c Developer Note'(PDF). Archived from the original on July 21, 2004. Retrieved September 30, 2016.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
- ^'2400c questions: Sound + PCMCIA Ethernet'. 68kMLA Forums. Retrieved September 30, 2016.
External links[edit]
- Macintosh: Support for External Floppy Drives (at Apple support site)
- vintagemacworld.com Apple External Drives
Portable Disc Drive For Mac
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