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Can I use 500 Gb USB Drive on Windows and Mac

E

Ed4132

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 22, 2009
146
0
Honduras
Hello

I have Windows at work and I have Mac at Home always I need to move files from one computer to the other so I want to buy a Portable USB Hard Drive (500GB) to do that, How I must format this Hard Drive in order to move files between Mac and Windows without problems.

Thank's for help on this matter
 
Check out the various file systems here: MR Guide: File Systems

If it were me, I would probably format it in Windows as NTFS and use something like NTFS-3G or Paragon on the Mac to access the drive for read/write

FAT32 is the easiest solution, but you won't be able to format a drive that large if I am not mistaken

You can format it as HFS+ (Mac), but you will need something like MacDrive on your Windows PC to access it for read/write
 
You can format drives up to 2TB, it's just that Microsoft has put in a restriction in Windows so that you can't format a drive larger than 32GB in the FAT32 file system. Their reason behind this was that the believed that anything larger than 32GB would be ineffiencient and heavily fragment using FAT and so they force you to format it in NTFS.

I've downloaded a free program that will allow you to format any drive that is < 2TB but I can't remember what it's called. I have it on standby, just in case. :)
 
FAT32
  • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
  • No individual file larger than 4GB.
NTFS
HFS
  • Read/Write HFS from native Mac OS X
  • To Read/Write HFS from Windows, Install MacDrive
  • To Read HFS (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer
 
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