external drive for a MBP

[Luis Ortega]

I have a 120 g 7200 rpm Maxtor external drive (model says 5000DV) that has firewire 400 and USB connections. It was used with my Dell laptop via firewire for video editing and it came with an install disk that had to be used before the laptop could use the drive. It's about 21/2 years old.
Is this drive suitable for connecting to my MBP for video editing?
Since the install disk is a few years old, would it have the correct drivers or whatever for an Intel Mac or would it be for PPC Macs?
Do I need to install drivers for it in OSX?
I have no idea if it's Sata or IDE but if the connections are firewire, does that matter?
I would like to use it for video files and also put a clone of my system on it in case I ever needed to boot up from it to fix or reinstall the MBP OS (assuming that this is the way such a procedure is done. On my Dell I had a Norton ghost of the system drive stored on it in case I ever needed to reinstall all of my system drive after a fatal corruption.)
I imagine that it was formatted for NTFS so would I need to let the MBP reformat it to something else? I don't envision needing it to connect to a PC also, but it would be nice to have the capability to use it in both Win XP and OSX.
Thanks a lot for any advice.

 

[majordude]

Is this drive suitable for connecting to my MBP for video editing? I imagine that it was formatted for NTFS so would I need to let the MBP reformat it to something else? I don't envision needing it to connect to a PC also, but it would be nice to have the capability to use it in both Win XP and OSX.

The Firewire 400 side of the drive is fine. The USB is NOT!

You will need to format it so that OSX can read/write to it. It cannot do that with NTFS.

Windows and Mac can share FAT32 formats (you have to format it that way inside of OSX beacuse XP cannot format a large drive FAT32 anymore)... but I'd recommend formating it to the OSX standard.