Using an External HD on Both OS X and Windows -- Help!

[dawnraid]

I have just purchased a Seagate freeagent 250gb external HD for my house, however this hardrive is to be used with and moved around to various windows PCs and my macbook. I need to know what to format the drive to, writing files to it from my macbook (hfs+) to the drive formatted as FAT32 is sooooo slow 1+ hours to transfer 5gb, this is not practical for me. Can somebody please tell me what to do so that both Windows and OS X can both read and write at decent speeds to the drive. Thanks in advance

 

[Neil321]

I have just purchased a Seagate freeagent 250gb external HD for my house, however this hardrive is to be used with and moved around to various windows PCs and my macbook. I need to know what to format the drive to, writing files to it from my macbook (hfs+) to the drive formatted as FAT32 is sooooo slow 1+ hours to transfer 5gb, this is not practical for me. Can somebody please tell me what to do so that both Windows and OS X can both read and write at decent speeds to the drive. Thanks in advance

hi i would format your external hfs+ and put macdrive 7 on your bootcamp
partition and on the PCs (you can download it with more than one user licence)

 

[dawnraid]

Thanks this seems to be a good solution

 

[richard.mac]

or you could format it to FAT32 if your not transfering files over 4GB. if you need it to transfer large files from Mac OS X to Windows then MacDrive is a good solution.

 

[dawnraid]

hi it was originally formatted fat32, but when using os x to copy files it was so increadibly slow (ie like 50mins for 5gbs of movies (probably like 6 movies), im using macdrive now with the hd formatted hfs+.