Formating an External Hard Drive

[AtHomeBoy_2000]

I am going to buy an external firewire hard drive to back up my pictures and home movies. My problem is this, what should i format it as? FAT32 is standard, but I will be putting DVD disk images on there that are larger than 4.0 GB (FAT32's limit). HFS+ is good, but not readable in Windows. So, this hard drive would have to be tied to a Mac. I should be safe with HFS+ for a while since I doubt Apple with drop support for it anytime in the near future.

Your thoughts?

 

[mad jew]

HFS+ seems like the sensible option. MacDrive will let Windows machines read and write with it too.

 

[dkoralek]

HFS+ seems like the sensible option. MacDrive will let Windows machines read and write with it too.

The problem with this solution is that only windows computers with MacDrive will be able to read the external. I've been in this same situation before. If you don't need the big dvd images, then fat32 is ok. But if you need larger files, you're kind of screwed unless you go with macdrive. It would be nice if there were better support for ntfs in os x.

cheers.