MyBook Live 3TB w Mac - Need Guidance

Need some help understand use mode(s) of this device. Really appreciated any help. I have stopped using the box until I figure this out.

I bought this intending for use as general NAS device in Mac-mostly household.

I am hoping at the least I have ~3TB of spare storage, even if I bought something with incorrect expectations.

I chose not to download and install the ‘Personal Cloud’ software yet, because I am not sure I really want that. I want this to be accessible by several users for their own use / own space and for sharing. Not sure if that software locks you into one user. And I just wanted to offload storage from some machines without buying an entire new mac.

  1. Is this a FAT32 or HFS+ Journaled disk, out of the box? I ask this b/c I would like to offload some large iPhoto Libraries to it, and from what I can gather, iPhoto requires this (and probably some other mac apps)

NOTE: If I direct connect by ethernet cable, to a mac, It seems like the box appears as another Mac, I guess limited to file sharing. it exposes some pre-defined public folders and what looks like a TimeMachine mount point

NOTE: in this mode, going into Time Machine prefs will allow me to select this device as a Time Machine backup disk

in this regard, leads me to suspect it uses a Mac file system?

  1. performance - regarding (1) I noticed when copying iPhoto libraries of several GB (and not terribly big) it was really slow early on, and sometimes speeded up later, but still, after researching, no way should be taking half and hour or more, for instance, on a DIRECT mac to MB Live ethernet connection. This leads me to think if the issue is because its not really showing up to the source Mac as a disk device, but rather an emulated Mac on the network. I suspect that may be it, and maybe I did make a mistake in what I bought - but, if someone could illuminate this issue, would be great.

  2. Must I use the ‘Personal Cloud’ software I am directed to download and install? Or if not, should I use it? Perhaps that’s really what I do want? Can I install that software for ea. person in the house (on their own computer) so it can share this disk between all of us?

  3. Can this disk be used partially for that ‘Cloud’ storage and also for Time Machine? 

Also, I was not interested, at this point, in exposing my files on the internet outside the home, at this point - another reason did not do the Personal Cloud install yet.