iS THERE a hdd compatible used ex-changeably for both?
Portable Hdd for Mac 10.4 and WinXP? possible?
truebargains on 10/06/2011 - 09:45
Comments
Yep - scubacoles summed it up perfectly.
Most drives come as FAT32 anyway. The only tinme that becomes an issue for MOST people is when you are trying to save DVD and Game ISOs, as these are usually over 4GB in filesize.
This really only impacts me on my Wii backup drives, but the software automaticaly splits the files (to under 4GB) when writing to FAT32 so in practical terms it doesn't matter. I don't save movies as ISOs, I would burn an ISO to DVD (for archiving) and keep an encoded version (usually MKV) for playback
Just check what you want to save… if it's under 4Gb then leave the drive as FAT32. Otherwise, go for exFAT or NTFS. I've heard that NTFS is clunky on Macs, so perhaps exFAT is the go?
Anyway - if you get a Drive Partitioning software, you can change the format as you go. The traditional way used to be to use such a program to split the drive into a FAT32 and a NTFS partition, but really this is an unecessary complication now days.
Any USB or Firewire Hard Drive will be OK.. (provided the computers have the proper ports of course)
The filesystem you need will depend on what you want to do.
For pretty basic files less than 4Gb in size, you can use FAT32. (note that for large drive sizes, FAT32 is space inefficient)
You'll have to format it FAT32 using the Mac (XP wont format large drives as FAT32)
BUT you could also format it NTFS (probably a better option)
XP uses NTFS by default, MacOS can read NTFS by default but can't write to NTFS without additional software.
I ran a Mac with MacFUSE (https://code.google.com/p/macfuse/downloads/list) and the NTFS-3G driver (http://mirror.transact.net.au/sourceforge/c/project/ca/catac…) that did NTFS read/write reasonably reliably.. Be sure to eject the disk properly from all computers though.. NTFS-3G didn't like to read drives that had been yanked out without ejecting first!
Possibly the best option..
Finally, it appears that MacOS 10.6.5 onwards supports exFAT (essentially the new version of FAT32). If you can, you should probably upgrade to the newest MacOS anyway… Windows XP requires a driver to be installed to read/write exFAT but Windows Vista and Windows 7 can see it natively.
(I'd partition the drive with a small FAT32 portion that contains the Windows XP driver, in case you ever need to install it on someone else's computer)