I have two LaCie disks and they both are recognized by OS X. One is LAN disk and it shows as an external server. The other is attached using Firewire 800 (it also supports Firewire 400 and USB2). I had it first partitioned to three partitions, but once I bought the LAN disk, I repartitioned it to one partition. And on no case did I need other than OS X software (well other than the backup programs I used on my PC for the other two partitions).