Format for External Hard Disk shared by Windows and Mac

[Lukeksk]

I got 2 external hard disks (500GB each) and using them for backups of raw home videos. I want these 2 disks to be accessible by both my iMac and 2 other Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista notebooks. Does it matter how I format the hard disks or am I constrained to format them in FAT32 format only? If it has to be FAT32 format, will I be allowed to work with larger than 4GB files?

Thanks for help.

 

[alexbates]

MS-DOS (FAT) is format that Windows and Mac will both read. You should format them to that using Disk Utility.

 

[angelwatt]

Yea, unfortunately FAT32 is your best bet. It does limit the file size, but other than that it isn't too bad. Maybe eventually MS will start supporting more file systems

 

[ZMacintosh]

are they USB? or have the option for that?

if so, you might consider picking up an AirPort Extreme Base Station, and connecting the drives to that via a hub if oyu want both accessible.
Reason being, si that oyu can format them to HFS+ and still allow Windows and OSX to read/write to them.

 

[boazjoe]

One other option is to format as a mac drive and use MacDrive (http://www.mediafour.com/products/) on the PCs to access.

 

[velocityg4]

You can pair MacFuse with NTFS-3g to read/write NTFS on OS X. Though it can be rather slow. There is also ParagonNTFS but it is slowwww. There is a faster version of NTFS-3g on the page I linked to but it has an increased chance of file corruption during a system crash since it caches the data.

On the Windows side there is MacDrive 7 which allows Windows to read/write HFS+. I do not know about read/write speeds as I use MacFuse, since it is free.