WD Portable Hard Drive, Mac/Win use

[entatlrg]

Bought a new 500gb WD My Passport External Hard Drive it came formatted NTFS.

I'll be plugging it into my MacBook Pro and also my Windows machine and want to read/write files to it from both OS's.

From the searching and reading here I've learned the best way to do this is to leave the drive as NFTS and use the NFTS 3G software so I can read and write to it from my Mac and Windows machines. I just want to re-confirm that

I was going to format it to FAT 32 but since it's limited to a file size of 4GB (or is it 'folder size of 4GB or more' ?) if it works the nfts 3g software sounds like the best option?

 

[SDub90]

NTFS-3g works well for me in most cases, but sometimes it has been noticeably slow when copying large files. Since it's free that's a huge plus.

I've also formated to HFS+ and used mac drive on my PC, it was a bit faster than ntfs-3g, but mac drive isn't free ($50, not worth it IMO).

FAT32 is fast, free, and works natively on both systems, the only down side is the 4GB file size limit.


If you can live with the 4GB file size limit, FAT would be the best choice. If price matters then NTFS-3G would be the next best choice. Mac drive isn't worth $50 to get a HFS+ drive to work on windows, so I'd put that as last just for that.

 

[Thiol]

Personally, I prefer FAT32 just in case I ever need to use it on a different machine...

 

[NewMacbookPlz]

I was going to format it to FAT 32 but since it's limited to a file size of 4GB (or is it 'folder size of 4GB or more' ?) if it works the nfts 3g software sounds like the best option?

The 4GB limit is for individual files, not folders.