I just purchased my second WD Essential 3TB external drive… it comes formatted NTSC and I’m using a PC (Windows 7) My question is: "should I format this drive (using Windows) before I put data on it. I’m a photographer and I see alot of advice about formatting a drive before using it. Also… will this eliminate WD software on the drive?
That sounds strange I think NTSC is the format for DVDs. I would thing it would come formatted NTFS for Windows.
Joe
My mistake… sorry… its is forrmatted to NTFS. Should I do a format with windows 7 (during which I think it is checked for bad sectors?) I’m asking because I’ve read where you should always format a new drive. All help appreciated
I don’t think it matters if it is preformatted but it won’t hurt anything to reformat from Windows 7 and shouldn’t take long with it being blank. If you should need to access this drive with an XP machine it will need to be formatted with WD format tool. Xp can’t use drives bigger than 2T and this solves that issue. Also make sure this isn’t the only copy of your data. To many people have moved all of their important data to free up space and didn’t have another copy to fall back on when they had problems.
Joe
