What external harddrive for mac and windows?

Question

I recently brought a macbook, but would like an external harddrive that works with both windows and mac. is there any one that does? or what type of external harddrives are out there for just mac?

Answer 1

A popular brand for the Mac is LaCie, but any external drive would be ok as long as it has USB2.0 and formatted for Windows to be used for both computers.

Answer 2

Carling is actually wrong on that one.  He is right that windows won't be able to read a hard drive formatted for a Mac, but you can format a hard drive for Windows that Mac can read.  I'm not sure on the process of doing this on Windows, but on a Mac you can simply connect the drive, open disk utility and format the drive to the windows format and both computers will be able to read it.  Only do this if you want to be able to share files between computers using this drive.  If you don't need to do this, then yes partition the drive in two and format one for mac and one for windows, the advantage of this is that the write speed is optimized for both computers.

Answer 3

You can use any external hard drive for both windows and Macs. I don't believe there is a specific type for one or the other.

Answer 4

I have heard the western digital Hard Drives are excellent.

Answer 5

You can use pretty much any USB/firewire external hard drive with a mac and a pc but you have to make sure that you format it correctly.

There are PC two formats that your PC and Mac use:

NTFS

FAT

If you format the drive as NTFS, your PC will be able to read and write to the drive, however, your Mac will only be able to read files.

If you format the drive as FAT then both your PC and Mac will be able to read and write files, but filesize is limited to 4GB. That might sound like a lot but if you are in the habit of making large dmg files or video files on your mac then FAT isn't for you.

You should also be aware that if you format the drive in either NTFS or FAT then you will not be able to use the drive for time machine backups unless you partition it and have a Mac OS Extended(journaled) partition.

The final option is to format the drive as Mac OS Extended(journaled) which will allow you to use the drive for time machine backups and this format is the Mac's preferred format.  In order for a PC to read this, however, you will need to install MacDrive on it which will allow it to read all the files on there even though they are on a mac formatted disk. The only files that you wont be able to browse when connected to the PC are your time machine backups.

-- Summary --

* Format the drive as FAT if you don't mind no time machine backup and a 4GB file size limit.

* Format the drive with a FAT partition and a Mac OS Extended (journaled) partition if you want to do time machine backups and don't mind a 4GB file size limit on files in the FAT partition

* Format as NTFS (from your PC) if you want to read/write from your PC but only read files from your mac.

* Format as Mac OS Extended (journaled) and install MacDrive on your PC if you want to use time machine backups, have no file size restrictions and be able to read and write from both pc and mac.

Answer 6

Hard drives are hardware. and will work with any computer system, it is the operating systems that are the problem, each operating system have their own disk file format,

Windows will not read the Mac file format, and Mac will not read the Windows file format, to use an external on both systems you would need to partition the hard drive and put the mac file format on one partition and windows file format on the other partition, that way each operating system would have it's own partition,

depending on what your going to do with the external hard drive, use it for a data drive for both operating systems or use it to boot both systems up (dual boot systems)