External Hard Drive Setup for Home ....

[sammyman]

I want to setup the best external hard drive system with my new laptop and my desktop. I currently have a new mbp, and a pc desktop (vista). I use the laptop for audio recording and photoshop and I host some websites using dreamweaver. My wife uses the PC for a photography business, and for writing papers. How should I setup an external hard drive for this situation?

Do I format ½ the hard drive for the mac, and ½ for the pc? Then hook it up to the PC and hope to access it over the network for my mbp? I would primarily use the hard drive for a backup on my mbp, while my wife would store photos onto the hard drive. Is it easy to setup this kind of network? I tried to setup a simple network to share printers which has got real buggy on me, so I need it to be somewhat simple.

Last question: Can I assign the hard drive an IP address for easy access from the laptop? Any ideas appreciated. Thanks!

 

[wallaby]

What you want to do is possible if you have an external enclosure that has an ethernet jack. The WD MyBook Pro: World Editions do this, I'm unsure of others. Then you can access the hard drive via the network from either computer. If your router has a USB port, then a USB external hard drive is another possibility. Finally, you could just plug it in via whatever interface, then unplug it and plug it to the mbp when necessary (most externals won't allow more than one usb/firewire connection at once).

As far as formatting goes, NTSC is best for Windows and HFS is best for OS X, but Windows can't see HFS and OS X can't write to NTSC. If you need to transfer files between them, have a FAT32 partition. Otherwise just do part NTSC and the other HFS.

Not sure on the last question but I would assume no. Unless its a World Edition MyBook like mentioned previously.

 

[zioxide]

As far as formatting goes, NTSC is best for Windows and HFS is best for OS X, but Windows can't see HFS and OS X can't write to NTSC. If you need to transfer files between them, have a FAT32 partition. Otherwise just do part NTSC and the other HFS.

NTFS is the windows file system, not NTSC. NTSC is the national television system committee.