[ADubin]

I'm in the process of buying a 15" MacBook Pro with a 500 gb internal HD. I'm currently using Adobe Lightroom on my Windows PC and want to move all my photos from LR and PS post process photos to my new Mac Book Pro. I believe I will need to use it for both backup and in the future will need to store original RAW file on it. Can somebody recommend a external HD/mfg/solution to help me solve this issue? I already have 1/2 TB stored on my external hard drive from my Windows PC system. Thanks, ADubin

[EndlessMac]

So it sounds like you are asking two questions.

1. You can use an external hard drive to move all your photos and other files over to your MacBook Pro. The external hard drive needs to be formated in FAT32 to be read on both Windows and Mac if you want to keep things simple. There are limitations with using FAT32 which you can read about by doing a Google search but it is a format that can be read easily by both Mac and Windows. Once you are done transferring your data over to your Mac then you can format your external hard drive in Mac's format using Disk Utility which comes with every Mac OS unless you want to use the hard drive for both.

2. If you are simply asking for external hard drive recommendations then any of the good ones out there will do because there isn't a Windows only or Mac only hard drive. I like Seagate myself but there several other good brand names out there. You just have to format them to either Windows or Mac formats if you want to gain the full benefits of each OS. As mentioned above you can use FAT32 if want also. The ones that are advertised as Mac hard drives are preformatted for you and they usually have Firewire connections because Firewire is more common on Macs than PCs.

[ADubin]

Thanks for you response. This gives me an idea how have to approach to this task. ADubin

Originally Posted by EndlessMac 

So it sounds like you are asking two questions.

1. You can use an external hard drive to move all your photos and other files over to your MacBook Pro. The external hard drive needs to be formated in FAT32 to be read on both Windows and Mac if you want to keep things simple. There are limitations with using FAT32 which you can read about by doing a Google search but it is a format that can be read easily by both Mac and Windows. Once you are done transferring your data over to your Mac then you can format your external hard drive in Mac's format using Disk Utility which comes with every Mac OS unless you want to use the hard drive for both.

2. If you are simply asking for external hard drive recommendations then any of the good ones out there will do because there isn't a Windows only or Mac only hard drive. I like Seagate myself but there several other good brand names out there. You just have to format them to either Windows or Mac formats if you want to gain the full benefits of each OS. As mentioned above you can use FAT32 if want also. The ones that are advertised as Mac hard drives are preformatted for you and they usually have Firewire connections because Firewire is more common on Macs than PCs.