Connecting to a network drive On an iMac

[RobinHood5]

I'm switching My sister and I completely to mac and have a question about connecting to our 1tb external HDD. It's formatted to NTFS and I guess you can only read, not write. Is this true? If so, what format should I use? Fat32? Idk. The problem is that it's half full (500gb) and we don't have another drive to transfer them to while I format it. Thanks for your help!

 

[Intell]

Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS without a third party driver like NTFS-3G. NTFS-3G is a bit slow at writing and reading and it can cause file system corruption.

Do not use FAT32 unless you have a very good reason too because you'll hit its limitations soon. The best alternative is HFS+, the Mac OS X file system.

When you get your iMac, its hard drive should have plenty of free space to temporarily store the external drive's contents so that you can reformat it to HFS+.

 

[RobinHood5]

Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS without a third party driver like NTFS-3G. NTFS-3G is a bit slow at writing and reading and it can cause file system corruption.

Do not use FAT32 unless you have a very good reason too because you'll hit its limitations soon. The best alternative is HFS+, the Mac OS X file system.

When you get your iMac, its hard drive should have plenty of free space to temporarily store the external drive's contents so that you can reformat it to HFS+.

Ok, thanks for the info.i do have one more question. Is the hfs+ compatable with windows also? The rest of the family is still windows and need acess to it.

 

[cw2k7]

Is it an external (directly connected) or network drive ?

If it's an external then another option is the Paragon NTFS driver as it gives read/write access, it performs better than NTFS-3G but it not free.

If it's a network drive then format doesn't matter as it handles the translation for you via smb or afp sharing.

 

[Intell]

Ok, thanks for the info.i do have one more question. Is the hfs+ compatable with windows also? The rest of the family is still windows and need acess to it.

No. Windows on a Boot Camp Mac do have an HFS+ read only driver though. There are third party HFS+ read/write drivers for Windows, but they are extremely buggy and should not be used unless you must.

 

[RobinHood5]

No. Windows on a Boot Camp Mac do have an HFS+ read only driver though. There are third party HFS+ read/write drivers for Windows, but they are extremely buggy and should not be used unless you must.

Their actually on windows pc's. Not macs