I recently purchased an external drive to upgrade from my Western Digital My Book 500GB Essential Edition. I needed the upgrade as I am planning to upgrade the hard drive on my MacBook Pro some time this year to at least a 500GB (from a 120GB). I decided to go with the Cavalry 2TB CADA002SA2-B external drive (aka. CADA-SA2).

It was selling for a good price (~1GB/$1) a couple of weeks ago. That and having the additional eSATA interface helps with transferring huge files (3.0Gbps vs 480Mbps, about 6.25x faster). Anyways, my My Book was currently setup with the following partitions:

• 120GB for HFS+. I just use SuperDuper ((SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless.)) once or twice in a month, and/or when I want to do a OS X update, to have a bootable backup just in case of Murphy’s Law.
• And the rest, 380GB formatted on NTFS. I use that space for backing up music, photos, videos, application install files, etc. both for Windows and OS X

I somewhat wanted to do the same with the Cavalry, but I’ve read on their site and their manual that it doesn’t work on OS X 10.5+. Luckily, someone posted a review on NewEgg that they have successfully gotten it to work with Leopard.

You can get this drive to work on Mac OS 10.5. The way Cavalry Tech support told me to do it was to find a OS 10.4 machine, format it on that and then plug it into the 10.5 machine. All I did was put in my old 10.4 disc, boot from the CD and use disk utility to format it. However, if you don’t have a way to boot OS 10.4 you are pretty much stuck.

I hope that helps for those who decide to get the same external storage and use it with your Mac products.