Do you always need to format your external hard drive when you buy it for the first time?

I recently bought a 160 GB simpletech external hard drive and i backed up data on the drive without formatting it. One thing which really surprised me was that when i tried using it with Mac, the mac wasn't able to read it giving an error, mind you that the MAC was the latest G5 machine, i had no problems with the PC though, but now i am wondering should i format the data and back up all over again coz its a pretty tedious process. Please help.
Do you always need to format your external hard drive when you buy it for the first time?
I think mac uses FAT file system, where as windows uses NTFS. Windows will also be able to use the FAT/FAT32 formats, so reformat the disk and copy the info over again and then see if your computer can read it. I would recommend formatting it on the mac, because the pc can read it after the mac formats, but not always the other way around.
Do you always need to format your external hard drive when you buy it for the first time?
All new HD's are unformatted, your best bet is download a Win 98 Boot disk from allbootdisks.com to partition the drive then format it via your OS
Reply:yes formaating is safer thing to do with a new hard disk
Reply:No, its not "always" necessary. I have seen brand new drives that have been factory formatted so they work "on the fly." However, when I have purchased such before, I have intentionally deleted the partition and reformatted again using my current O/S. Like you said, there was an error, but it wasn't reading it...that is exactly why I reformat anyway...just in case the factory formatting failed to recognize disk errors.
Reply:No, some come pre-formatted NTFS, like my Calvary USB drives (which are really a set of two 500Gb WD drives set up JBOD.





There are some disks however that need to be formatted. When you get one of them, always use the format function, not quick format...the extra time spent can result in a whole lot of time saving later on.