S

shinjijai

Member

• Mar 28, 2010

• #1

i have both macs and pcs at my house, what's the best file format to use if i plan to share this external hdd between those two os? i know fat32 will work, but it limits the file sense to 4gb which is no good for me.

is there any good ntfs drivers for the mac? or a free hfs+ drivers for windows 7?

 

DonMigs85

Member

• Mar 28, 2010

• #2

Shinji said:

i have both macs and pcs at my house, what's the best file format to use if i plan to share this external hdd between those two os? i know fat32 will work, but it limits the file sense to 4gb which is no good for me.

is there any good ntfs drivers for the mac? or a free hfs+ drivers for windows 7?

Click to expand...

My own drive has great file sense

 

K

Killthee

helped a brotha out on multiple separate occasions!

• Mar 28, 2010

• #3

IIRC, Snow Leopard's Bootcamp has an HFS+ driver (read only though). I'm using Paragon's NTFS driver and haven't had any issues lately, but every now and again it does tend to go bonkers.

Are all the computers using the same LAN? Have you considered leaving the drive connected to one system and then using file sharing to use it on the other systems. IIRC, that works; you can have Macs read and write via network file sharing to an NTFS drive connected to Windows or vice versa with HFS+.

 

E

Ecrofirt

Member

• Mar 28, 2010

• #4

I thought Macs has read/write support for NTFS in some of the newer releases?

If not, there's always NFTS-3G for OSX: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

 

K

kitchenmotors

Banned

• Mar 28, 2010

• #5

Just be aware that if you're using HFS+ and Windows Vista or 7, any ISO files that you transfer from a HFS+ drive to Windows will most likely corrupt. Apple's HSF+ drivers for Bootcamp 3 are very buggy. I found this out the hard way and thought that originally the issue was a problem I had made. The drivers corrupt most ISOs. The only work around I had was to use Fat32 driver and compress the files below 4GB, and then transfer. They worked fine after that.

 

S

Shogmaster

Member

• Mar 28, 2010

• #6

NTFS or XFAT?

 

P

Particle Physicist

between a quark and a baryon

• Mar 28, 2010

• #7

Ecrofirt said:

I thought Macs has read/write support for NTFS in some of the newer releases?

If not, there's always NFTS-3G for OSX: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Click to expand...

You can definitely read NTFS in Snow Leopard, but in order to be able to write, I think you have to enable it somehow. It might still be in 'beta.'


EDIT

Yup! Here it is:


--DON'T USE IT--

 

S

Sjoerd

Member

• Mar 28, 2010

• #8

Thanks quadriplegicjon, didn't know about that. Makes things so much easier!

 

P

Particle Physicist

between a quark and a baryon

• Mar 28, 2010

• #9

Hmm.. upon further research, it seems to be a bit unstable: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=785376

So I wouldn't really use it.

You can always format fat32, that works perfectly in both settings. You just can't have file sizes that are larger than 4 GB.


http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=9109465&postcount=109

It is not reliable. In fact it is actually quite dangerous to use it for moving or copying files (to, from on on an NTFS partition)...

Click to expand...

ignore my previous post!!!! I don't want to be responsible for ruining peoples drives.

 

T

teruterubozu

Member

• Mar 28, 2010

• #10

Get Apple's Time Capsule - it works for both Mac and PC.

 

V

vermadas

Member

• Mar 28, 2010

• #11

I had this same problem. Since I was using the drive for backup purposes, I didn't need the PC to be able to read the files I put there from the Mac or vise versa. I made two partitions on the drive in Windows (NTFS). Then I connected the drive to the Mac and formatted one of those partitions for Mac OS.

If you need a solution where Macs can write to the same partition accessible to PCs, I think your best option is going to be setting up a file share on your network.