I have a MacBook Pro and my wife has a Dell laptop, if I were to purchase the LaCie 301442U d2 Quadra Hard Disk 1TB eSATA/FireWire800/FireWire400/USB 2.0 External Hard Drive would I be able to use it as a backup machine for both computers at the same time? Can it be partitioned to work with both OS X and Windows XP? I am trying to avoid having to purchase two external hard drives. Thanks in advance.
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Help with LaCie external HD.
- Thread starter BostonApple
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You can either partition it with one partition for Mac OS X (with HFS as a file system) and one partition for Windows (with NTFS as a file system), but neither of your computer could do much with the other partition without 3rd party software.
Or you could format the external HDD with FAT32, so that both Operation Systems (OS) could access the HDD, but the biggest file size is 4GB per file.
But with your choice of HDD, you won't have access to the HDD at the same time from both of your computers via Firewire or USB or eSata.
Better would be a network HDD like the LaCie Network Space HDD.
That way you just connect it to a router/switch/hub and both computers will have access to it at the same time.
The speed will be around 11 MB/s when you have 10/100Mbit Ethernet, or around 41MB/s when you have Gigabit Ethernet.
Or you could format the external HDD with FAT32, so that both Operation Systems (OS) could access the HDD, but the biggest file size is 4GB per file.
But with your choice of HDD, you won't have access to the HDD at the same time from both of your computers via Firewire or USB or eSata.
Better would be a network HDD like the LaCie Network Space HDD.
That way you just connect it to a router/switch/hub and both computers will have access to it at the same time.
The speed will be around 11 MB/s when you have 10/100Mbit Ethernet, or around 41MB/s when you have Gigabit Ethernet.
***EDIT*** you beat me to it.
yes, use the Mac Disk Utility and partition the hard drive for mac extended for the mac and leave the other side blank, then use the windows machine to format to NTFS. This would keep the backups separate since the windows machine can't read or write to mac os extended partitions and the mac can't write (it can read) the NTFS partition.
You could partition the whole thing as MS-DOS (FAT32) which would be readable by both machines so you could do backups on one large volume if you don't to go to the trouble of making two different partitions. FAT32 has it's limitations like single file size can't be over 4GB.
yes, use the Mac Disk Utility and partition the hard drive for mac extended for the mac and leave the other side blank, then use the windows machine to format to NTFS. This would keep the backups separate since the windows machine can't read or write to mac os extended partitions and the mac can't write (it can read) the NTFS partition.
You could partition the whole thing as MS-DOS (FAT32) which would be readable by both machines so you could do backups on one large volume if you don't to go to the trouble of making two different partitions. FAT32 has it's limitations like single file size can't be over 4GB.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. I am trying to keep the cost as low as I can, do you think that for what I am looking to do the LaCie drive I outlined is a good/best option in a 1TB external drive? I will probably just be manually plugging the hard drive into each computer on a weekly basis for backups.