Would like support for 6+ Gb files but not essential.

Ta.

 

I use a 250Gig ext USB drive.....

works with all my computers

Dan

 

tbh most portable drives will do the job. You just need to format it so that both mac and pc can see the drive. I suggest put it on the mac, using disk utility and format it MS-DOS. That was the PC will definately see it and the mac will have no problem.

as for size, well starter size is around 40-60GB and upwards.

Lacie are good, Freecom but my favourite is G-tech drives

 

Thanks guys but I have the drive but I want to know the best disk format for it.
I can use FAT32 but won't get large files, will a MAC read and write NTFS OK?

It's a project I'm working on and unfortunatley, ext disk in the post is the most effecient way of sending 60+ Gig a fortnight.

 

FAT32, you will have problems with NTFS.

Or maybe some kind of NAS that supports CIFS

 

I just bought an 80GB WD passport drive that works with both my mac and PC.

However you will not be able to format it NTFS for the mac to read it, FAT32 only and its archaic 4GB file size limit Im afraid.

Gary

 

I've been checking off SN (shock horror - there are other websites!!) and it seems NTFS would be readonly on MAC, can anyone verify as this would be fine for me.

 

Hank,

Well I re-formatted the WD as NTFS and when I plugged it in to the mac OS X just said it was unreadable volume so I went back to FAT32.

Gary

 

Your research is correct. An NTFS formatted external drive would be read only when attached to the Mac.

 

Get a USB/Firewire based enclosure and a disk of whatever size you want. It'll work out cheaper than getting, for example, a lacie drive, also means you can slam in whatever capacity you want.

When it comes to what format to you use on the drive, depends on whether you want to purchase additional softwar for the PC. If you don't then you're limited to using FAT32 as the Mac only mounts NTFS as read-only. Using FAT32 does mean that you could encounter filesize limits (3GB?).

If you don't mind purchasing software for a PC then have a look at MediaFour's MacDrive product as it allows HFS volumes to be accessed on a PC.
I've been using MacDrive on my Boot Camp partition to allow access to my normal OS X boot drive, plus also access to my two external drives and the PC seems to have no problem at all reading the drives. I think MediaFour have free 30 day trial of MacDrive so it might be worth downloading it to have a look.

As for why NTFS is read-only, I think it's something to do with NTFS being a closed standard and thus you'd need to write a driver (or whatever the correct terminology is) to cope with read/write, and not knowing the full specs it could result in data-loss and that's a tiny bit of an issue

 

If you can't write NTFS on the Mac and would like support for files >4GB, you could format your drive as ext2 or ext3, as used by Linux. You can get software to read & write these formats for both Mac and PC.

 

I have the disks already.
Ideally has to be NTFS or FAT32.
Probably going to give NTFS a try.
Thanks for the input.