Does anyone know of a > 500gb external hardrive that can service between Macs and PCs? Thank you!?

Question

I am looking for an external hardrive with more that 500 gigabytes of memory that can store files from both a mac and pc simultaneously. It does not need any fancy automatic backups, click and drag will do just fine. Also, the more memory the marrier!

Answer 1

Any hard drive would do, the problem comes with the partition. For Windows, the best partition is NTFS, although Mac will read NTFS (so you can access your files) it won't write to NTFS so you can't copy Mac files to that drive.

As a result, you'd need to use two partitions, one NTFS to store your window files, and then one HFS+ to store your Mac files.  

Alternatively, you can use a program like Macfuse to write files to the NTFS partition.

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If your external drive was less than 320gb then you could just use the Fat32 partition, that should be read by both Windows and Mac.  But since you want 500 or more, if you went for 500gb you could try creating two 250gb partitions under fat32 (but Fat32 can not store files bigger than 4gb)

Answer 2

Any hard drive can do this, the problem is that you will need a file system that both Mac and PC support. Microsoft uses NTFS and Mac uses HFS. Mac can read from a NTFS drive but can't write to it. I think there are things you can download to allow Mac to both read and write NTFS, but I couldn't recommend anything in particular. Just google "Mac OSX NTFS" and you'll find something. Another thing you can do is format the drive as FAT32. The problem with this is that the largest a FAT32 drive can be is (I think) 32 GB. You would have to partition your 500 GB drive into a bunch of 32 GB parts. That would be pretty annoying for you, I imagine.

Hopefully someone has a better answer than this, sorry.