external hard drive PC to MAC best practices?

[airtas]

I have two hard drives both NTFS format

I want to use the hard drives with MAC and PC, is it safe back and forth?

will it even work?

I know I could just connect it to my mac to see but I am worried about data loss

 

[GGJstudios]

Mac Guide on External Hard Drives

Any external hard drive will work with PCs or Macs, as long as the connectors are there (Firewire, USB, etc.) It doesn't matter how the drive is formatted out of the box, since you can re-format any way you like. Formatting in HFS (Mac OS Extended) or FAT32 or NTFS-3G can be done with the Mac OS X Disk Utility.

FAT32

• Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
• No individual file larger than 4GB.

NTFS

• Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
• Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
• To Read/Write NTFS from Leopard: Install MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. You can install both with NTFS-3G for Mac OS X.
• To Read/Write NTFS from Snow Leopard: Guide: Enable native NTFS Read/Write in Snow Leopard
• (Be aware that some are of the opinion that enabling native NTFS in SL is unstable/unreliable, and favor the MacFuse/NTFS-3G method for Snow Leopard)

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

 

[curlefry]

If you're migrating to OSX then NTFS seems like you're best bet to start off with, which is what I did for example to migrate my iTunes library from Windows to my new MBP. GGJstudios's post makes me think NTFS-3G will be best for you.

 

[airtas]

GGJ.......thanks for the write up

do you see any problem connnecting to PC and Mac back and forth on the hard drive?

also is mac usb the same speed as PC, everywhere I look it says to connect via firewire

 

[GGJstudios]

do you see any problem connnecting to PC and Mac back and forth on the hard drive?

No, as long as the drive is formatted properly.

also is mac usb the same speed as PC, everywhere I look it says to connect via firewire

Yes, USB is the same speed, regardless of the computer. The same is true for firewire. The reason you see firewire recommendations is that it is much faster than USB.... especially Firewire 800... more than twice as fast. That makes file transfers much faster, but USB will still work.