1 External Hard Drive for Your Mac and PC

So you have a PC, a Mac and an external hard drive you want to all play friendly. Well it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Sure, the USB or Firewire ports are the same on both machines, but the real culprit is file formats.

Windows uses either FAT32 or NTFS. Mac OS X uses Mac OS Extended also known as HFS+. All you really need to know is that they are just three different methods for storing information. Macs can handle some Windows formats, but Windows cannot handle HFS+ without additional software.

To see the format of the external drive, right-click on the icon and select Properties (Windows) or Get Info (Mac)

Mac OS X has been able to read and write FAT32 formatted hard drives since the very beginning. If you have a FAT32 drive you can simply connect it to your Mac and it will very easily be able to read and write to it. There is nothing special you need to do. However, there are two limitations of FAT32. 1.) It only supports file sizes of 4GB or less. 2.) Some Mac applications may not run from the drive as FAT32 does not adequately handle the permissions structure of Mac OS X.

NTFS is a different story. NTFS is a more modern Windows format but is proprietary to Microsoft. Licensing is required to use it which is probably why Apple doesn’t fully support it. Macs can read an NTFS drive, but they cannot write to one. So you have 4 options if you have an NTFS external hard drive:

How to Format Your External Hard Drive - Mac OS X

• Backup any data on the drive - formatting will erase everything.
• Open “Disk Utility” (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility)
• Click on the External Drive
• Click on the “Erase” tab
• In “Volume Format” select either Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or MS-DOS (FAT32).
• Click “Erase”
  
  Note: This is to format your drive using the default settings. You can further customize the formatting by selecting partitions, security settings, free space and other options. See http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/partitioning_tiger.html for a great step-by-step walkthrough.
  
  
  
  How to Format Your External Hard Drive - Windows

• Backup any data on the drive - formatting will erase everything.
• Double-click on “My Computer”
• Right-click on the External Drive
• Select “Format...”
• In “File System” select either FAT32 or NTFS
• Click “Start”
  
  Note: This is to format your drive using the default settings. You can further customize the formatting by selecting capacity, allocation size and other options. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313348 for further details.
  

Do you have any tips to share about using your HD on both a Mac and PC? Let us know or ask questions in the Comments section below!

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Your Comments:

Lorax, I think you would need the formats to be the same. Sounds like FAT32 then.

 Chris Kerins
 02/20/2008  at  06:59 PM

Rats! Was hoping to be able to have each partition optimized for each OS. But, I suppose FAT32 would be the way to go ...IF I limit myself to only 1 drive. I suppose I could pull out the wallet and get another drive, then dedicate 1 to each machine/OS! Thanks for your feedback, Chris.

 Lorax
 02/20/2008  at  07:07 PM

this is all greek to me, but i'll give it a try---thanks

 Robert
 02/21/2008  at  02:54 PM

Need some help please: I just bought my first Mac today (MacBook Pro) and I have an old PC. I also bought a 500 GB external hard drive to move files over to from my PC. My plan is to move my iTunes music and movies and some pictures over to the hard drive. I would like to use the hard drive via firewire with the new MacBook Pro rather than filling up the internal hard drive. I would have to connect to my PC via USB rather than firewire (not sure if this makes any difference but thought I should mention it). I have not formatted the hard drive yet so I am looking for advice on how to go about this so I can move the files and then still use the hard drive with my shiny new Mac. Help? Advice? Thanks!

 Dave
 03/04/2008  at  03:20 PM

DAve, by the looks of it above you should use Disk Utility to reformat the drive in FAT32 if it isn't already and just start using it. USB/Firewire won't make a difference.

 Chris Kerins
 03/05/2008  at  10:39 AM

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I will give it a go.

 Dave
 03/05/2008  at  01:19 PM

MacFUSE along with NTFS-3G is a great option for those looking to use NTFS on their external drives. If you can get it working correctly, it's a life saver with external disks and reading/writing to a boot camp partition.

 panther
 03/07/2008  at  01:23 AM

MacFUSE/NTFS-3G is a great option: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Read speeds from NTFS are fine, but write speed are dreadfully slow. I have my external drive connected over eSATA so I'm use to fast speeds, the speed hit might not be so noticeable for for USB connections.

I'm not aware of any, I'm researching now, but curious if there is an third party/alternative file system that would be fast and accessible to both OSX and XP. Maybe somthing linux based?

 Jon
 03/08/2008  at  10:07 AM

there is this piece of software that allows you to use NTFS format drive whilst connected to a mac with full read and write access http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

 Gazza
 03/14/2008  at  02:20 PM

Question about FAT32, just to make sure I understood this right: the 4 GB size limit refers to the max. individual file size, or the entire partition? In other words: can I format a 500 GB HD entirely in FAT32 (with the limitation of no SINGLE file being larger than 4 GB)?

 Khondar
 04/02/2008  at  01:44 AM

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