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What makes a external "mac" drive different.

Chriz6097
By Chriz6097
in Storage Devices
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I was wondering why there even is a specific type of external drive labeled "mac drive". Is there any specific difference or is it just a marketing scheme?

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Price.

 

Drivers.

 

That's it.

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Just some helpful stuff: You're - You are, Your - Your car, They're - They are, Their - Their car, There - Over there.

 

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I've heard of Apple putting a chip that restricts the usage of the drive with non Apple products. I have a Mac disk drive for my Air but I've never tried it on my win7 machine

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I've heard of Apple putting a chip that restricts the usage of the drive with non Apple products. I have a Mac disk drive for my Air but I've never tried it on my win7 machine

 

Give it a try, I doubt Apple did that.

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Just some helpful stuff: You're - You are, Your - Your car, They're - They are, Their - Their car, There - Over there.

 

Folding @ Home Install Guide and Links | My Build

 

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Just a price markup and the apple logo.

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Price.

 

Drivers.

 

That's it.

Would a "home made" drive using old hard drives work fine then?

My System Specs: (Short list) i7 4770k, GTX 780, many SSD's, a 2 TB HDD(deceased :( ), Corsair 650D. Full list: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/kchriz6097/saved/8dh7YJ

Upgrade Plan: Acquire some Black Noctuas then add 16 or 32GB of 2133MHz memory

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Would a "home made" drive using old hard drives work fine then?

Yes. Normal usb devices work on macs.

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Would a "home made" drive using old hard drives work fine then?

 

Yeah most likely

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Just some helpful stuff: You're - You are, Your - Your car, They're - They are, Their - Their car, There - Over there.

 

Folding @ Home Install Guide and Links | My Build

 

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nothing 

 

im an idiot, its partition differently, windows wont see it at all, my bad

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Just some helpful stuff: You're - You are, Your - Your car, They're - They are, Their - Their car, There - Over there.

 

Folding @ Home Install Guide and Links | My Build

 

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im an idiot, its partition differently, windows wont see it at all, my bad

A quick youtube tutorial and some time will turn my old unused laptop drive to an external mac drive.

My System Specs: (Short list) i7 4770k, GTX 780, many SSD's, a 2 TB HDD(deceased :( ), Corsair 650D. Full list: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/kchriz6097/saved/8dh7YJ

Upgrade Plan: Acquire some Black Noctuas then add 16 or 32GB of 2133MHz memory

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Its apple so it must be faster

(Jokes)

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It has apple naming so they can charge more.

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A quick youtube tutorial and some time will turn my old unused laptop drive to an external mac drive.

 

Yeah, that'd be it lol i would tell you if I remembered off top of my head

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Just some helpful stuff: You're - You are, Your - Your car, They're - They are, Their - Their car, There - Over there.

 

Folding @ Home Install Guide and Links | My Build

 

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all wrong ....

 

HFS+ formated ... that's it ;)

 

Those are all right, Your point was also valid as well,

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Just some helpful stuff: You're - You are, Your - Your car, They're - They are, Their - Their car, There - Over there.

 

Folding @ Home Install Guide and Links | My Build

 

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I was wondering why there even is a specific type of external drive labeled "mac drive". Is there any specific difference or is it just a marketing scheme?

Price and how the drive is formated.  You can always reformat the drive, so I'd say you should save the money.

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Price and how the drive is formated.  You can always reformat the drive, so I'd say you should save the money.

 

Yeah well the 90% general consumer won't know how to reformat the drive.

 

The other thing is, many non-Mac branded hard drives are formatted as NTFS, which Mac cannot write to, only read. This is what happens when a popular format is owned and created by Microsoft. Some are formatted in FAT32, but that has the file size limit of 4GB. As some have posted already, Mac ready drives are formatted in HFS+.

 

Can PC fanboys not simply rant on about price and marketing gimmicks. It's annoying and does not contribute to anything in any way.

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