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external hard drive
- Thread starter goldeneye
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1) You need to format the drive with FAT32 formatting under Windows if you want to write and read from both the Mac and the PC. THis limits the size of the drive (to 128 Mb I think? Who on MR has successfully partitioned an external to multiple partitions of FAT32 and HFS+? Please jump in)
2) The PC will have to have a Firewire port, or the drive will have to have a USB 2 port. Your best bet is a combo USB/Firewire drive -- you want Firewire for speed and Mac bootability
3) This is an either / or situation, you clear on that? The drive can be hooked up to only one machine at a time. You will want to shut down before transferring it to the other machine.
2) The PC will have to have a Firewire port, or the drive will have to have a USB 2 port. Your best bet is a combo USB/Firewire drive -- you want Firewire for speed and Mac bootability
3) This is an either / or situation, you clear on that? The drive can be hooked up to only one machine at a time. You will want to shut down before transferring it to the other machine.
my laCie 160gb external hdd connects with macs and windows no porblems.
its the porcshe(SP?) design
its the porcshe(SP?) design
i want to also chime in as i'm in the similar situation. I just recently bought an external hard drive for my MBP. I've formatted it on my PC and stored all my data from the PC onto the external hard drive.
My MBP can read from the drive, which is great, but I can't write onto it.
What can I do to be able to make the drive readable and writeable using PC and Mac?
My MBP can read from the drive, which is great, but I can't write onto it.
What can I do to be able to make the drive readable and writeable using PC and Mac?
You need to reformat it as FAT 32 instead of its current NTFS, which Macs cannot write to.loveAffair said:
Uh, no actually, you want to use Firewire 400 because it is twice as fast as USB 2.0 in real-world performance and doesn't load down the CPU of the machine nearly as much. (Yes, I have benchmarked it: Same drive, same 1.3 Gb data transfer, FW400 = 2 x USB 2.0)
CanadaRAM said:
Good advice CanadaRAM, I have a FW400/USB2.0 combo drive, and its primarily just for backup purposes, have also found that FW400 is faster, but I think that if goldeneye is not that big on speed and would rather get more storage (drive used for music or periodic backups ect) I would rather save the money and go for a USB 2.0 only and spend the savings and get a biggeer HDD.
The disparity between packaged Firewire and USB2 drives is bigger than on the enclosure side. From what I have seen you will pay at least $25 more for a firewire drive and your selection will be severely limited. But I too can tell you from experience that that extra $25 is totally worth it. USB2 drives have a really annoying spin-up lag that Firwire drives don't have. If you dont mind waiting for your drive to kick into action then get a USB drive, but I prefer firewire by far.gallivant said:
Hmmm... so OS X can't write NTFS? That's an arse. I'll be hooking up three 300gb drives to my macs soon, they're all formatted NTFS and I can't reformat, too much data and nowhere to put it!!!
Spanky Deluxe said:
Then complain to Microsoft.
The only system that can reliably write to a NTFS partition without corrupting the partition is Windows. When a file is added to an NTFS filesystem under Windows a number of hash keys for the filesystem are updated. Without these updates the partition ends up being identified as a corrupted partition. Outside of Windows no NTFS driver implementation that can reliably write to NTFS as far as I am aware.