Disk Formatting advice for external hard drives

[GrimmPenguin]

My Senior Technology Seminar class has purchased two external hard drives. One is a 1TB which will be used for archiving all of our video footage, projects, photos, EVERYTHING. Another is an 80GB external hard drive that will be used for temporarily transferring footage and whatnot between our computers. The issue at hand is that they are formatted for FAT32 and some of our captured footage ends up being well over 4GB, so we cannot place it onto the hard drive.

The 1TB hard drive will only be hooked up to six Macintosh's, so I was thinking that an appropriate format would be something like HFS+. Does that sound like a good format to use, or does anybody have a better one in mind?

The 80GB hard drive will be used in both a Macintosh and Windows environment. So I need a format that is friendly to both operating systems and will hold files over 4GB. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks for the help in advance

 

[cbrain]

HFS+ should be fine on the 1TB, but the only format that will run fine with both that I can think of is FAT32.

 

[bengal85]

Fat 32 should be fine for the one I mean that is a common formatting name

 

[GrimmPenguin]

My problem with FAT32 is that it doesn't support files larger than 4GB, which sometimes our video footage can get that large, and I don't really like having to separate the footage into multiple parts if I don't have to...

 

[GrimmPenguin]

Has anyone ever tried NTFS? I think it's read-only in Mac OS, but that's better than nothing.

 

[sickmacdoc]

To me, the solution would be to format the 80Gb drive as NTFS, but then install either the commercial program Paragon or the free combination of MacFuse and NTFS-3G as described (and it includes links to the necessary files) in this article at Lifehack. Very simple to install BTW.

Either of these solutions will allow the Macs to write to the NTFS volume in addition to the native ability to read from it. There are rumors that the Paragon solution is a little faster in writing to drives, but I have no experience with it since I have been using the MacFUSE/NTFS-3G solution for some time now with good results.