Will I be able to use this to format the drives?
1087731
I would avoid buying this brand. The drivers are out of date; it's old technology. I own about 8 "Plugable" docking stations. The answer is yes to your question. You can format the drive in Disk Management in Control Panel.
1987832
If your disk matches the format supported by this device, yes. IDE/PATA/SATA
163743
Yes you can. However, it might not if you format the thumb drive to a different format. e.g. FAT32 versus NTFS or whatever?
1652669
Yes. You will need an enclosure, then connect via usb or thunderbolt, then format the drive Mac OS extended journaled or as need.
135684
Yes--but you will need to use Disk Utility to reformat it. Takes just a couple of minutes.
1010672
Yes. The drive will run at the maximum speed if your machine up to USB 3.0.
301146
Should work. As I do the same thing within my own house with flash drives. My desktop is win7 / USB 2.0, my Laptop is win7 / USB 3.0. I've never needed to re-format my flash drives and I do get the speed increase from the USB 3.0 Laptop. I can imagine, with the proper operating systems involved: Portable HDDs should't be any different.
1179299
yes, you can't format it to FAT32 it must be formatted to NTFS - there is a dropdown menu and that option is there when you format the drive.
361679
Yes you can split the drive and format each half for Mac and the other for windows
2214288
Yes, but format it in your pc first! Use a card reader or a built-in card slot. Right click on it when it shows in the drive list and use the menu to format it.
427918
Actually, these drives are pre-formated for NTFS. If you use the WD Data Lifeguard Tools software, you can quick format the disk in 60 seconds. And you can format it as either as bootable or as a secondary drive. I don't "think" you got a reused drive.
747540
I don't know. I am unsure if the adapter I had works properly. Your system sees something, but if you reformat, you will lose the info on the drive.
516599
Yes you can use it if the drive is formatted using FAT32. However doing so has a limitation because FAT32 FS cannot support individual files greater than 4GB. Also you will see a degraded performance regardless of which hard disk you buy.
289965
You sure can, there is no need to format the drives before installing. I bought this to take my two drives from an old desktop that had died, each that had plenty of data, and had it up and running with my new laptop in no time at all with full access to all of the old data. I've now used this with both Windows XP and Windows 8 without any issues, and have since swapped in a new drive from another old desktop.
749647
Yes it will work. If using an external hard drive, you may have to format to enfat
1975928
You should be able to. I was able to reformat it to ext4 for a Linux data drive with no problems.
504748
Yes it will go through the USB or eSATA (preferred) You just format the drive.