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 SuperDuper1 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.

1. SuperDuper is the wild­ly acclaimed pro­gram that makes recov­ery pain­less, because it makes cre­at­ing a ful­ly bootable back­up pain­less. [↩]