Question 1

Is this compatible with Snow Leopard? It says it needs formatting? How do you do that?

Accepted Answer

With only a few exceptions, any hard drive you buy will need to be formatted before you can use it with a Mac.

The first time you connect the drive to your Mac, you will be prompted to "Initialize" the disk.  Just choose to initialize it, and it will do the rest.  The initialization process will format the disk to work with your Mac.  Very simple.

Question 2

is it  SATA 1?

Accepted Answer

Not really relevant.   It connects to your PC USB 3.0 port (or 2.0 port at slower speed).

Question 3

I updated the firmware on my iMac running OS 10.8.5 and I see the Passport (WD My Passport WDBKXH5000ABK 500GB) but it is read only and I cannot drag files or folder to the HD?

Accepted Answer

The drive is probably formatted NTFS so to iMac it is read only. It needs either FAT32 formatting to be read/write by both Windows and Mac or Mac specific formatting to be read/write only by Mac.

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