Free agent Go software for OS X?

[6172crew]

So I bought a Seagate 640g free agent and didn't notice it was for a PC and Im looking to back up my Imac and use it to view movies, pics, etc on my TV with the free agent theater+ deal but it is loaded with software for a PC.

Any ideas how to wipe out the PC and load it with osX software? Or better yet can I partition it to work for both of my platforms?

[Casual_Shooter]

If it's formatted for a PC, you will have to reformat it to HFS (or something like that) to run the best with the mac. Otherwise, you run into a file transfer size limit.

[bak]

use disk utility to reformat. if you want to use with both mac and windows you will have to format in fat32. Or in windows use software called macdrive.

b

[TonyM]

Personally, I would format it in NTFS (fat32 has a 4GB file limit) and then install ntfs-3g (free) or Tuxera (commercial, based on ntfs-3g) on your mac to give you write access to the NTFS volume. http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

I wouldn't worry about the apps for the freeagent, I have 4 or 5 of the drives here and never used their software after looking at it once.

[bak]

[QUOTE=TonyM;3949144]Personally, I would format it in NTFS (fat32 has a 4GB file limit) and then install ntfs-3g (free) or Tuxera (commercial, based on ntfs-3g) on your mac to give you write access to the NTFS volume. http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/



ooo nice tip did not know about that software. Definitely format ntfs.

Thanks
b

[ocabj]

I haven't used the NTFS-3G driver in over a year, but the reason I quit using it is because the I/O performance was horrendous.

[TonyM]

yeah, the freeware versions performance isn't the best, but it's free. If you want more performance, that's why they created the commercial version that has much better performance... $25 Euros per license.

[6172crew]

Personally, I would format it in NTFS (fat32 has a 4GB file limit) and then install ntfs-3g (free) or Tuxera (commercial, based on ntfs-3g) on your mac to give you write access to the NTFS volume. http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

I wouldn't worry about the apps for the freeagent, I have 4 or 5 of the drives here and never used their software after looking at it once.

Ok, I bought the commercial version and copied the free agent software in case I want to use it later. When I went to use the disk utility on OS x it does not give the option to format or partition for NTFS, so I will have to use MS to wipe it clean and partition.

I guess if I thought about what I really wanted it is a backup system for both of my platforms and a way to rig pics, music, and video over to the external so I can get the other systems clean.

I planned on wiping out the imac as soon as all my junk is copied over to the new drive.

Thanks for the advise gents

[Rivers]

The Mac will read that Seagate drive as it's shipped, no formatting required.

[TWoods450]

If the drive is in NTFS, and you run NTFS-3g there is no reason to format, which in Disk Utility is not shown as an option. If you want to format the drive under the mac, just use Disk Utility to select the drive, set to 1 partition, choose 'Mac OSx Journaled' which is HFS+ you might also have to go in and set the file table to GUID. Its really not as complicated as it sounds, but can't agree more with going with NTFS and using NTFS-3g, that way it can go to/from mac and pc.

and for backing up, I personally just drag files from my mac right onto the NTFS formated drive I have (using NTFS-3G), others I know prefer the use of Time Machine which is included with OSX 10.5 and newer.