External Network Hard Drive

[Nekkid Fish]

I was thinking about getting this network hard drive, which would work with both the PC and the iMac, rather than just getting one to use with the Mac.

Anybody have a Western Digital 500 GB External Network Hard Drive?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000FS4OCW/yahoo-ce-20/ref=nosim

Thanks and HUGz! Jules

 

[Kelmon]

I'm pondering the same thing at the moment but I think I'm going to try the combination of one of the new Airport Extreme and an Iomega MiniMaxi drive that I can also use as a USB 2.0 hub. I think this solution will be good for Leopard since I'll be able to use Time Machine whenever I am connected to my home network, easily expand my network by attaching new drives to the MiniMaxi hub and also get my wireless printing. Mind you, this assumes that wireless is desirable for you as well but since my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro supposedly will support 802.11n then I think it's worth a bash.

Regardless of the above, I do believe that Western Digital drives are very good (I had one for years in a PC) so your choice should be fine.

 

[Patronus]

I am also thinking of hanging a big drive off of a new Airport Extreme. I am considering the LaCie 500G that has the same form factor as the Airport Extreme. My question is: if this drive is accessed from both Mac's and PC's on the network, does it have to be formatted Fat32 or can I use NTFS?

 

[Kelmon]

My question is: if this drive is accessed from both Mac's and PC's on the network, does it have to be formatted Fat32 or can I use NTFS?

The answer is almost certainly FAT32 unless you want the Mac to have read-only access to the data on the drive.

 

[Patronus]

Actually, the reason I asked is that I can access with read/write to NTFS drives shared on a PC on my network today (not directly hooked to the Mac, but a drive with sharing turned on on a desktop Windows unit). I wonder if a network drive would act the same?

 

[ChrisA]

I am also thinking of hanging a big drive off of a new Airport Extreme. I am considering the LaCie 500G that has the same form factor as the Airport Extreme. My question is: if this drive is accessed from both Mac's and PC's on the network, does it have to be formatted Fat32 or can I use NTFS?

Your PC and Mac clients will not "see" the drive's file system. What they will see is an "SMB" file system. Exactly like if you were to share a folder on you Mac or PC.

You will likely have the option the format the drive as either FAT or HFS+. Certainly not NTFS as Microsoft seems not to want to license NTFS writting. But like I said, the PCs and Macs on your network will not be able to "see" which file system is used.

One thing I DON'T like about the new Airport Extreme is that the device supports only 100BaseT. So even a wired network connect will be four times slower than a USB drive. Well in real life it is only 2x slower. A slow drive is OK for backups or for sharing some data not not much else. You really want to use gigabyte Ethernet for a file server

 

[Patronus]

You will likely have the option the format the drive as either FAT or HFS+. Certainly not NTFS as Microsoft seems not to want to license NTFS writting.

Why can't I format the drive as NTFS from my PC and then mount it up to the airport?