File transfer back and forth from PC

[ThaFindizzle]

I am switching over to apple after many years of PC use (no applause please). I still have a nice Toshiba laptop that I plan on using for working on the go. For excel and word files I plan on just emailing myself but what about larger conversions like MP3s, media files and the like. Is there a way to have an external hard drive that will work for both machines? Suggestions?

 

[yellow]

Sure.

Just make sure it's formatted FAT32 (with it's inherant limitations) and it'll work just fine on both the Mac & the PC.

Alternately, you could format the drive HFS+ (for the Mac) and purchase MacDrive for the PC, which will allow Windows to read/write to HFS+ formatted disks. No real limitations on HFS+ (by this I mean, I doubt you'll have 16TB of HD, etc, etc).

And finally, there's no way to get OS X to write to NTFS formatted drives.

 

[ThaFindizzle]

What are the limitations of which you speak? Certain file types won't work?

 

[yellow]

Max single file size of 4GB.

For example, a large movie of more than 4GB cannot be written to a FAT32 drive.

 

[ThaFindizzle]

Thanks Mr. Yellow. I look into getting out of the crack game.

 

[JBot]

now i hate a question in reguards to this.
I have this set up, an external fat32 formatted hdrive, linked with my pc(windows) and networked to the powerbook.
however, my pc is dual booting windows and linux, and when i am running linux, accessing my hdrive, i cant access it through the laptop.
any suggestions?

 

[yellow]

Sorry, don't really know in Linux.

I imagine it'll have to be an addition to the fstab so the drive gets mounted and then you'll have to have it shared with samba (which you'll probably have to install), blah blah blah linux stuff I don't really know.

 

[Sun Baked]

What are the limitations of which you speak? Certain file types won't work?

Partition size limitations, and file size limitations.

Since you are keeping the PC, it shouldn't be too difficult to get around file type limitations.

For those of us without a PC, we need Virtual PC or MacLinkPlus.