External Hard Drive for mac and PC?

[Nyaos]

I have a custom PC and a MacBook. I use my MacBook for everything like word processing, web browsing, and light photo editing.

I use my Windows desktop for gaming and more demanding tasks.

I often download large files to my MacBook, 4-10GB in size. I want to use an external hard drive to transfer over the files to my PC, but my hard drives are formated in FAT32 and do not allow files over a certain size to be written I think.

Is the solution to format in NTFS? And if it is, how do I do that? I don't want to burn to DVDs. Right now I transfer the data over a LAN but it takes a long time due to WiFi.

 

[old-wiz]

NTFS can be read by osx but not written unless you use addons like macfuse (I think is the name). HFS (OSx native) can be read by windows with add-ons. To format to ntfs you'd have to copy all the files somewhere temporarily as format will wipe the data.

 

[flopticalcube]

Paragon. $40. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

 

[sngx1275]

MacFUSE and NTFS-3G, both Free.

Need to be pretty careful about safely removing, or unmounting the drive if you use a certain version of it. Read up on it or wait til someone who remembers more details than I do posts.