External for Mac and PC?

Orcvader

Orcvader

Orcvader

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My brother is going to get a Macbook Pro this September for university. He basically needs an external HDD to move all his stuff from his PC to the Mac as he plans on leaving the PC at home before he moves out. Problem is, I heard there are some externals that doesn't work with both PC and Macs as they both format HDDs in different ways? Is there an external that's garanteed to work between the two to allow easy file transfer? All he needs is about 500gb, and he's not willing to spend more then £50 for it.
 
It's not the drive, it's the formatting, which can be changed. Basically the best formatting to use is:

- Windows Only: NTFS
- OSX Only: HFS+
- OSX (10.6.5 or later) & Windows (XP SP2 or later): exFAT

So, if he wants to always have the drive available to both Macs and PCs, use exFAT. If he only wants to transfer the files to his Mac and then just use the drive on his Mac, use exFAT to make the transfer and then format as HFS+ afterwards.
 
Oh ok never knew that, would there be any noticable performance lost formatting the drive to exFAT instead of NTFS/HFS+?
 
With third party software you can get OS X to read and write to NTFS formatted drives so if for what ever reason exFAT wouldn't meet your needs that's always a possibility.
 
Orcvader said:
Oh ok never knew that, would there be any noticable performance lost formatting the drive to exFAT instead of NTFS/HFS+?
Click to expand...
exFAT is basically a 64-bit version of FAT32 so it is not as efficient as NTFS or HFS+ (both of which are much newer technologies). Thus, there is a performance penalty but you wouldn't notice this if you were just using it as a storage drive (for backing up or storing media on it). Fortunately, exFAT removes FAT32's 4 GB file limit so you can use it for that purpose.

If it's going to be used for programs, games etc. in the future then I'd use HFS+ once the data transfer has been completed.
 
Think I prefer the idea of using software to read NTFS drives. He's going to be using it as a storage drive for his work after he moves his personal files to the Mac, and he'll be dealing with large files, and will be writing/reading from the drive a lot since he does graphics.

Saying that, would it be easier then to format it to HFS+, then getting third party software for Windows to read it (His uni also only uses Macs only)? Does anyone know any free HFS+ software for Windows then?
 
I know Macdrive can do that, but it costs.
I'm sure i've come across some free software before that embeds itself into windows to read linux partitions and that works with mac ones too afaik.
 
Alright then, thanks everyone for the help :). Guess I can just give him one of my spare externals then, find a software to read/write HFS+ and my bro should be all set up for uni :D.
 
Doing the opposite would be a much better option IMO. Format the hard drive as NTFS, but install an NTFS driver which provides read/write support on the Mac. e.g. NTFS for Mac from Tuxera or NTFS for Mac from Paragon. There's also NTFS-3G which is free, but this is not as fast as either of the NTFS for Mac apps and isn't compatible with Lion yet.

The advantage to doing this way is that the hard drive could be used on any Windows PC, whereas if it was HFS+ formatted it could only used on a PC that has MacDrive or HFS+ for Windows installed.

Mac OS X also includes a real-only NTFS driver, so if your brother did need to connect the hard drive to another Mac he would still be able to access his files. The same could not be said about HFS+ on Windows.
 
Thanks, but he'll also need the ability to write on it, he will not be using a PC at all for university and the macs at the uni may not have drivers to allow the mac to write on the NTFS external. Hence why I've decided it will probably be easier to get a Windows driver to read/write for HFS+ as he'll only be using the PC to get his files to move to the mac.
 
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