External Harddrive formating

[Flash3441]

I just purchased two 2TB Western Digital MyBook Studio hard drives (from Apple) to store raw video content on. We have one Mac Pro for video editing but the rest of the office uses Windows XP.

How can I format these hard drives so they will be accessible on both OS10.4 and Windows XP? We want the full 2TB of each HD to be in one partition. Should I do the formatting on the Mac or on the PC? Any help would be appreciated.

[gwihannom]

Recently went through a similar situation as you.

First it doesn't really matter where you format the drive from, Mac or Windows.
Just make sure you format it to FAT32.
Under Mac, it will show up as "MS-DOS" format.
Choose that in the Disk Utility, and you will be able to see it.
Do not format it as NTFS, mac's can't write on them.

Unless you select to partition it, it will create one large 2TB drive.
Some say, and probably true, that Mac OS Extended (Journalled) is the most reliable disk format. Maybe so.
But in your case, you'll be using both Mac and Windows, so you have no other choice.

[ZMacintosh]

hm, FAT32 for raw video content.

well how big in general is your video content because 1-single piece of video that is 4Gb or higher will not fit on your drive.

Im not entirely sure on advanced networking if there is a way to share it over to your other comptuers via the macpro, but i know if you use an AirPort Extreme or TimeCapsule and its formatted to HFS+ that both Windows & OSX can read/write to it via that.


but if your video files are under 4GB than no problem whatsoever.

[Flash3441]

Thanks for your replies and advice. I started reading through other topics here and found out about MacFuse and NTFS-3G and now it works like a charm. The only bad thing is that every Mac that wants to get access to these hard drives will have to have these installed on it to recognize the NTFS format.

The reason Fat32 will not work is because we are storing raw video and some of the files are over 70gb in size. Partitioning a 2tb HD into 4gig Fat32 partitions would not have worked for us for the very large files.