January 2, 2011 - Iomega 500GB Silver Prestige Mac, WD 160GB Red Passport Windows, WD 3TB Black Elements Windows, and WD 120GB Black Passport Windows (in background Macbook Pro with 500GB HD). Found a Free Western Digital (WD) Hard Drive Disk (HDD) Formatter on the Western Digital website called the "Quick Formatter for Windows or Mac", and used it to format the above 3TB and 120GB. Easy, fast, and does the job better than any other program out there. This will save you time and money in many different ways.
See direct link to Western Digital Website:
support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?wdc_lang=en&fid=...
WD Quick Formatter to format external drives (Windows 7, Vista, XP) or Mac OSX (Leopard, Snow Leopard, or Lion)
If you are like me and take a lot of pictures daily, you will end up having the internal hard drive on your computer that will become slower at photo editing and processing due to all of the images you load on to it. My brother (network and help desk manager) told me to load as much data on an external hard drive to allow the computer to run the operating system and programs as fast as it can without having to read/write to different sectors of your hard drive as you work on your images. The computer's HDD spins to run programs, while the external's HDDs spins to read data.
Since Mac format is a higher price for same amount of date space when purchasing HDDs with USB 2.0 connection (it is a higher price if you purchase a HDD with FireWire connection to Mac) I felt I could save some money by purchasing the Windows Formatted WD 3TB HDD. But I had such a hard time reformatting from Windows OS to Mac OS using the Mac programs and other free on-line programs. After my many attempts to format the 3TB HDD had failed, I searched the WD website and found the Western Digital program that works without any issues or failed reformats.
Something else that may help to know is that I had issues with the older WD 120GB Black Passport above (I had stopped a reformat from Windows to Mac, with Mac reformatter after about 4 hours, which caused drive to be unreadable by both Mac and Windows computers, not good). After giving up on it ever working again I thought this Western Digital prgram could perhaps fix it. I reformatted to Windows OS on a Gateway first, then reformatted to Mac OS on Macbook, total reformat time about 15 minutes. It works just fine now (please note that reformat erases all Hard Drive info). Taking photos with the Canon 7D I find I am using about 500GB a year due to the large files it creates, so the 120GB and 160GB will be portables for traveling and I will use two 500GB portables to be backups to the 3TB Drive (Iomega 500GB Mac eGo Red not shown in above image).