I'm sure this ? has been asked/answered a mil times....Please help

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

The nice man at the Apple store set up my 1T MyBook for Mac to work with my MacBook laptop. I also have an  iMac at home and really can’t shlep it to the Apple store.

Can anyone tell me…in the SIMPLE-EST TERMS POSSIBLE… how I go about setting up the MyBook so it will also work with the at-home iMac…now that the back-up drive has been set up to work with the more portable MacBook.

Thank you for your consideration and patience with an amateur at computer stuff (even Mac)

Karl Sonkin

2

There should be no reason why the drive won’t work exactly the same on any of your Macs.

A drive can be formatted for a certain operating system (Mac, windoZe), but that doesn’t affect or limit which compatible computer you can use it with.

Just plug it in to your “at home” Mac and it should mount and work just fine…unless it’s one of the new “Smartware” drives that are problematic right out of the box.

3

Thanks for the reply—sorry I didn’t get to you sooner—I plugged the drive into my “home” computer and it started backing up just fine, but it’s taking a llloooooooooooooooooooong time to back up the contents of my iMac. The dialog box says there are a million-plus items in the iMac, about 70 gigabytes of material, and it has taken nearly 24  hours (!) to get close to the end. Should I be concerned or just let it do its thing? Again thanks for answering the first time.

Karl Sonkin

Menlo Park, CA

4

24 hours for 70 gigs!?.. that certainly is an issue/problem/concern.

Even with a slow USB 2.0 drive something like that should take about an hour and a half.

I wonder if you just drag (copy) a file onto the drive if it still has such a slow transfer rate.

Is it that slow on any computer or just your at home Mac?

Maybe you should call the nice man at the Apple store and run this issue by him.

Generally speaking though the new WD drives are problematic. I’ve used them for years and recently made the switch to Seagate drives due to the problems with the new WD stuff.

The easiest way out of this hassle is to return the drive (like I did).

You can reformat practically any hard drive for Mac OS in like three minutes, so you really don’t need to go to an Apple store. Other computer stores have a much larger variety of drives…all of which can be formatted and used with any of your Macs in minutes.

If you need instructions on how to format a drive for Mac OS there are thousands of pages online that explain it step by step.

-attach the drive

-launch Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder which is inside the Applications folder)

-Select the drive from the left column.

-select erase and choose the new format to be Mac OS journaled

-name your new drive and click erase.

In a minute or two it’ll be done.