Best Portable External Hard Drives Reviews

Is Western Digital USB 2.0 external hard Drive compatible with mac? Can you further explain how to format this for Mac — and can it be interswitched between a Mac and a computer? I am an idiot- specifically, how do you format this for a Mac? Also, is it fine to do this, or should I buy a specific hard drive already formated or designed for Macs?

Yes–but you will need to use Disk Utility to reformat it. Takes just a couple of minutes.

If you have a PC, you will generally format this drive using the NTFS file system. A Mac can only read NTFS formatted drives, but can not write to them.
If you format this drive to FAT32, both PC and Mac will be able to read/write to it.

*the limitations of FAT32 however, prevent a single file size being greater than 4Gb

Go to the Applications folder and scroll down to the bottom where you will find a Utilities folder. Open it. Find the application “Disk Utility” and double click to open. When it is open, find the external hard drive in the list and select it. Click on the Erase tab. Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Format: popup menu. Give the drive a name. Click on the Erase… button. Wait a few minutes. Quit Disk Utility. You are ready to go.