NTFS File systems & Macs

[drewel]

I just bought my first ever Mac & I love it! But, I am wondering if my external firewire hard drive, which is NTFS will work with my Mac?? (my hard drive is not with me now to try) I was reading through the Mac manual & it seems to me that it may not work- but if that's the case, I will cry.

Regards.

 

[kgarner]

If I remember correctly, your Mac should be able to read it, but not write to it. Unless that was changed in one of the latest updates (ie 10.3.4).

 

[Horrortaxi]

Read only.

If you format it as FAT 32 then both can read and write--but as I recall FAT 32 has a maximum size under 40GB.

 

[Flight16]

as I recall FAT 32 has a maximum size under 40GB.

I have a 120Gb firewire drive that's Fat32 formatted and works fine under XP and OS X. Windows XP doesn't let you format HDDs bigger than... I forget what, but much smaller than 120 gigs (but it _can_ read them no problem). So you either have to use OS X (it lets you format fat 32 right?), something like Partition Magic on windows, or *nix to format it.

I really really didn't like the idea of going back to a non-journaled file system like fat32 from NTFS or HFS+, but it really is the only solution (besides using something like drive opener for windows) to share a HDD easily between platforms.

As a side note, MS has plans to start charging companies who use fat32, as it is patented. Things don't look good for digital cameras and mp3 players if this happens. I wonder what they'd do about Linux's implementation of fat32, or what about OS X, and the iPod?