Best way to share an External HDD between Windows and Mac

[ram4apple]

Hi Guys,

Can an external hdd be used in both windows and mac ?. I would like to transfer some files from the iMac to the NTFS formatted HDD and put them on my wife's laptop (Windows)

I tried NTFS3G and also tried editing the fstab to add the UUID of the HDD and make it rw.

none of them worked properly.

This should not be that hard, and it started to get really painfull when i cant get all the my movies off the iMac.

Any good Suggestions or am I missing anything here ?

what did you guys do when you made the switch to the Mac.

Please help me.

Thank you

Ram

 

[Hellhammer]

FAT32 is accessible by both OSs natively, so it's your best option as long as your files are smaller than 4GB (does not accept +4GB files). exFAT is another option if you're running Windows 7.

 

[GraceMolloy]

2nd for exFAT, I do on occasion have an issue with being able to empty the trash of a file from the exFAT drive but the next time I reboot it is fine. Osx thinks the file is in use. But not a huge deal.

- via iPhone

 

[dfine1966]

I use exFat and it works great. Both operating systems read and write to the drive.

 

[MacAndMic]

For just this purpose, why not just set up a shared folder on your machine and connect over the network.