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Mac Vs PC External Hard Drive

M

Macnificant

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 26, 2008
578
114
I am looking to purchase an External Hard Drive and I was looking on Western Digitals website. They show Mac and PC hard drive.

Are they interchangeable?

I didnt know one couldnt be used with the other
 
The price difference is often due to interfaces. "PC" drives usually only have USB. "Mac" drives often have USB and firewire both. The PC drives may be formatted as NTFS, while Mac drives formatted as HFS+. The formatting isn't important - you can quickly reformat when you setup the drive. The interface for firewire is often faster than usb. Firewire drives can be daisy chained.
 
Just buy whatever is cheapest, theres no difference.

Lots of great deals here: http://dealmac.com/

You should be able to find 1TB for about $80-100.

I see theres a Lacie for $90 right now, not my favorite, but as good as any.
 
What I would like to add to this discussion is that yes you can use a hard drive on both Mac and PC if it's formatted as FAT32 but it really is a pretty limiting format and I would suggest you only do that if you really need to go back and forth between Mac and PC. FYI most USB flash memory sticks are formatted as FAT which is why you can use it back and forth between Mac and PCs.

Also keep in mind that if you can get a Firewire 800 hard drive then it's much faster than USB 2 and Firewire 400. This is a nice luxury when you are transferring many gigs of data.
 
EndlessMac said:
What I would like to add to this discussion is that yes you can use a hard drive on both Mac and PC if it's formatted as FAT32 but it really is a pretty limiting format and I would suggest you only do that if you really need to go back and forth between Mac and PC. FYI most USB flash memory sticks are formatted as FAT which is why you can use it back and forth between Mac and PCs.

Also keep in mind that if you can get a Firewire 800 hard drive then it's much faster than USB 2 and Firewire 400. This is a nice luxury when you are transferring many gigs of data.
Click to expand...


Where can you get the information to reformat the hard drive to FAT32 so it is compatible with PC and a mac? I need it to be interchangeable as I transfer a lot of files between work (PC) and home (mac).
 
abean17 said:
Where can you get the information to reformat the hard drive to FAT32 so it is compatible with PC and a mac? I need it to be interchangeable as I transfer a lot of files between work (PC) and home (mac).
Click to expand...
Use Disk Utility's erase option.
 
abean17 said:
Where can you get the information to reformat the hard drive to FAT32 so it is compatible with PC and a mac? I need it to be interchangeable as I transfer a lot of files between work (PC) and home (mac).
Click to expand...

Msdos format in disk utility is actually fat32. If you want ntfs, you unfortunately have to boot into windows.
 
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