I got this external hard drive to use with Mac OS X Leopard so I could use "Time Machine". I'm in fear of losing my music and stuff. I tried connecting the drive. It found it right away, but when I went to set it as my backup drive for Time Machine, the disk utility included with Mac OS wasn't able to format it. Hoping it wasn't a bad drive, I plugged it into my Windows machine and successfully formatted it with NTFS. Weird, too, was that after that, I was able to connect it to my Mac, and presumably read/write from/to it (but I didn't try, but it definitely showed up as a drive on my desktop). I tried again to use it for Time Machine, and again it failed. Until today, when I got home for work, I was dead set on getting a new drive and using the TB drive for my Windows backups.

I had this idea that 1 TB was too big for it? Yeah, I was skeptical about my own thinking on that one as well. But anyway, I tried to partition the drive using the same disk utility in Mac OS. It successfully partitioned it into two drives, basically splitting the drive in half. After that, I was able to use it with Time Machine. Not wanting only 500 GB for daily backups of my 160 GB Mac drive, I tried to erase it and format it again. It worked! So now I have a full TB for backups of my Mac. I'll just get another external drive if I really need Windows backups, but there's really no cool (maybe good, but certainly not cool) software out there to do it. Maybe this will help someone. The drive I have is a USB 2.0 Western Digital "My Book" at 1TB. There's another model that has firewire, but USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire 400 (but I think FireWire 800, which this MacBook Pro also has, is faster than anything out there). Peace.

I'll post a picture or two of Time Machine in action soon, but there's TONS of pictures out there, so don't wait on me.