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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