PC external hard drive enclosure

[BlindSet]

Hey guys, I just bought my first mac, a BlackBook and so far I am very impressed. However, one thing that I would like to do is have access to some of my files that are on a hard drive in my PC.

This hard drive has nothing but media on it, windows partition or anything like that and I have seen that compUSA has an enclosure that you can put an internal hard drive into and then connect to a computer via USB2.0.

My question is whether the files on this harddrive will be readable on my mac in such a fashion.

Thanks in advance,
BlindSet

 

[frankblundt]

AFAIK, yes. If it's been formatted as NTFS then the mac should be able to read from it, but won't be able to write to it.

If it's FAT32 formatted then the mac will read/write to it just fine (although the limits of the format mean it won't accept file sizes larger than 4GB)

If you intend to continue using it between Mac and PC, leave/format it as FAT32 (I think it's called MS-DOS in Disk Utility)

If it's going to be used on macs only then the Mac HFS format (Extended Journaled) is a much better option.

Don't forget to copy the stuff off the drive and check it before you format the drive...

If the drive is larger than 120GB you'll also want to make sure the enclosure has large drive (ATA-6) support.

If the PC is working tho and you want to keep it that way, then maybe networking the two of them would be more straightforward.