External Hard Drives..... help me please

[gavsim]

Hi Guys,

After a bit of help, my boss is buying me an eMac for Home and I would like to buy an external hard drive for it but I would like the drive to be able to be read from both Mac and PC's so I can back up my Girlfriends/Parents and my machine to one drive.

How can I do this? Im looking at a Maxtor 250gb, if I format the drive as NTFS will MacOSX (Panther) pick the drive up and be able to read and write to it? I am pretty sure it can read and write to Fat32... but doesn't Fat32 have a partition limit size?

Any help greatly appreciated :)

Cheers,

Gav

[JDar]

I think the La Cie drives can handle this dual format that you wish--I can't lay my hands on their doc's at the moment but you can check out their web site. As I recall the drive came formatted so that either a Mac or Pc could use it right away.

My LaCie has worked beautifully on an iMac and their free Silverkeeper backup software gives a bootable backup and runs rapidly.

[gavsim]

I think the La Cie drives can handle this dual format that you wish--I can't lay my hands on their doc's at the moment but you can check out their web site. As I recall the drive came formatted so that either a Mac or Pc could use it right away.

My LaCie has worked beautifully on an iMac and their free Silverkeeper backup software gives a bootable backup and runs rapidly.

Cheers JDar,


I did a little bit of researching and found this: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/topic/59099-1.html

you can have the drive go between each system, so long as the drive is Fat32. Looks like I will be buying a Lacie D2.

Cheers.