Hi, looking for advice. I want to transfer 5000ish photos and videos saved in folders and photo library from my OSX Yosemite Macbook pro 2011 to an external drive. I was looking at 500GB scandisk but it seems it is not compatible with my old mac. Your suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
TIA
Western Digital or Seagate portable. I use WD, a friend uses Seagate.
thank you. i’ll check them out 
Just had a thought, theres no reason that drive should be incompatible with your computer. Its it formatted in some mad PC way? Whats the mesage you get when you try… If, for example, its something like not recognising the drive… you can initialise it whic will wipe any foreign material thats on it. Did you buy new, or did someone give it to you. IN other words, whats its history?
You should format the disc using the inbuilt Disc Utility app before putting it to work.
Mac OS Extended for spinning drive
APFS for solid state drives.
Al
Please be aware that formatting will COMPLETELY ERASE everything on the drive, so make sure you have a copy of anything that you want on it somewhere else before doing so.
1 Like
Is there a reason you stopped upgrading at 10.10 Yosemite? 2011 MacBooks came with 10.7 Lion and are upgradeable to 10.13 High Sierra. I wonder if a newer version of macOS would make any difference to your situation.
Are you sure you were trying to format the external drive rather than the built-in drive?
Assuming you’re transferring them to your new Mac, there is always file sharing too:
@sr1 does not specifically mention that they have a new Mac, just that they want to transfer from an old mac to an external drive