finally I got around to buying a new external hard drive for the Mac today, been meaning to get one for ages. I bought a pretty fancy windows compatible seagate free agent one and spent the last 30 minutes working out how to format it and another 20 minutes how to partition an area for Time Machine to work.

Not sure about whether logic follows to use time machine on a portable hard drive, probably not, but wanted to play around it to see how good it really is before I buy another drive just to look after that kind of backing up.

Anyway turns out all of this formatting was childs play and the 2 videos that helped me can be found here and especially if you want time machine here, while you’re at it this is a pretty interesting read for older OS’s and those who partition. Other than that I do want to comment on this Seagate thing, and something I think many hard drive companies are doing, and that is playing on the Mac name and ripping us off. This same hard drive would have cost double what I paid if I bought it for Mac, and yes I would have got firewire (like I care that the transfer rate from 0 to 360 gb would take me 5 seconds longer over all) but its not the point, it should say instead of Windows compatible, Windows enabled but Mac compatible. It isn’t that hard to format the drive, certainly worth watching a 5 minute video to save £60s at the time of writing this.