1TB External drive for Only $130?
I just bought an Acomdata PureDrive USB 2.0+esata. Since the drive was so cheap, and since it supported eSata, I decided to get a esata card for my heretofore unused expresscard port on my macbook pro. The combo works wonderfully! I get over 400 mbits sustained reading and writing. Not bad!
There is one trick. The drive comes formatted with an MSDOS partition. When I tried to format it to OS X extended, I got this error “File system formatter failed.” Looking on the internet, I found this post which described a “multiple partition” method. In truth, the only needed action is as follows:
- Go to Disk Utility
- Click on the external drive
- Click on Partition
- Pick “1″ under “volume scheme”
- Select “Options”
- The selected partition scheme is likely “Master Boot Record.” You want GUID. Select this and click “Apply”
- When the previous step finishes, go to “Erase” and select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click erase.
Magic! Turns out this is a problem with really large disks. So this could happen on Western Digital or other external drives.