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View Full Version : External 160 GB HDD: which filesystem?



koswo
Jan 6, 2005, 07:27 AM
Hello,

I'm going to buy an external hard disk drive (SmartDisk CrossFire 160 GB). I want to use it on both, my G3 iMac (I have Mac OS X 10.3 running on it) and my girlfriend's Windows XP laptop. What filesystem do I have to format it in to be able to read/write from both systems?

Thanks

koswo


homerjward
Jan 6, 2005, 07:41 AM
i believe you'll want to format it in FAT32, because winxp and osx can both read/write to that. xp can't do anything with hfs+ and osx can read to ntfs but can't write to it.
ChrisBrightwell
Jan 6, 2005, 08:57 AM
FAT32 is where it's at right now.

Maybe Tiger will finally add real NTFS functionality to OS X.
Mertzen
Jan 6, 2005, 10:48 AM
Sadly enough it will have to be FAT32 .. though I never had problems with that it does feel like cheating .. :p
ChrisBrightwell
Jan 6, 2005, 11:31 AM
Sadly enough it will have to be FAT32 .. though I never had problems with that it does feel like cheating .. :p
You'll have problems when you try to do things like back up your home directory. FAT32 doesn't support "aliases" (which I think are just *NIX symlinks, but I could be wrong), so you're bound to have problems w/ things like iPhoto albums.