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External Hard Drive Formatting Issue

N

nmaxwell

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 2, 2012
3
0
Kinda stuck, any help would be appreciated. Here's my dilemma:

Used to have a Windows laptop, have 2 external hard drives (NTFS) that were used on windows. Now I have a 2011 MacBook Pro, and my hard drives are obviously read only on it. Which makes them somewhat useless if I want to use them as a back up, or even to add/remove/rearrange files on them.

What I was hoping to find out is:
1) if there's any way to get write permission without losing the data
2) what format should the drives be in (can't use FAT32 because I have dozens of video files larger than 4gb)

I THINK I'm stuck here, because even if I had space to empty my drives and keep the information on them elsewhere (which would probably take a month to move the ~1 TB of info), I cannot put a lot of it back if the .mkv files are too large for the new format.

Help!
 
Like you said, you can read NFTS form your Mac but not natively write to NTFS. To write to NTFS from a Mac you need to add a third party software package like Paragon.

If you are going to be using the external drives only with your Mac, the best format is the native Mac HFS+ format. This is listed in Disk Utility as "Mac OS X Extended." HFS+ can handle the 4GB+ files no problem.

If you want a format that works natively with both OS X and Windows, exFAT would work and it also does not have the 4GB limit of FAT32.
 
nmaxwell said:
are any of those programs free?
Click to expand...

At the moment none of the free NTFS utilities work with Mountain Lion. I have read you can kludge together MacFuse (here) with the old NTFS-3G, but have not tried it myself.

(If someone has more current info please correct me :))
 
Format A Hard Drive Using Disk Utility (which is in your /Applications/Utilities folder)

Choose the appropriate format:

HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Don't use case-sensitive)

NTFS (Windows NT File System)
  • Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
  • Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
    [*]To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X, here are some alternatives:
    • For Mac OS X 10.4 or later (32 or 64-bit), install Paragon ($19.95) (Best Choice for Lion and Mountain Lion)
    • For Mac OS X 10.5 and later, including Lion, FUSE for OS X
    • For 32-bit Mac OS X, install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free) (does not work in 64-bit mode)
    • For 64-bit Snow Leopard, read this: MacFUSE for 64-bit Snow Leopard
    • Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx $36), which is an enhanced version of NTFS-3G with faster performance.
    • Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard and later versions, but is not advisable, due to instability.
  • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS
  • Maximum file size: 16 TB
  • Maximum volume size: 256TB
  • You can use this format if you routinely share a drive with multiple Windows systems.

exFAT (FAT64)
  • Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.
  • Not all Windows versions support exFAT. See disadvantages.
  • exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
  • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support exFAT
  • Maximum file size: 16 EiB
  • Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB
  • You can use this format if it is supported by all computers with which you intend to share the drive. See "disadvantages" for details.

FAT32 (File Allocation Table)
  • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
    [*]Maximum file size: 4GB.
  • Maximum volume size: 2TB
  • You can use this format if you share the drive between Mac OS X and Windows computers and have no files larger than 4GB.
 
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