NTFS external HD on Mac OS X

I just bought a new 1 Tb external hard drive (Western Digital), and I want to be able to use it both on my Win 7 laptop and my wife's brand new Macbook Air OS X 10.7. I have googled a little and found a couple og sites which claim to have some kinda software/driver which enables the MBA to do exactly this, here and here - but I don't automatically trust these kinda sites.

Anyone who has any tips? Is the safest option to format the drive to FAT 32?

 

EXFAT, fat32 is way too limiting. using NTFS was easy in SL, but I have not tied with Lion yet as ntfs-3g was apparently broken with the new OS and was my main tool for that

that second link you posted looks like it may be quite usable.

 

You will also need to update MacFuse for Lion, in order for NTFS write capability to function correctly.

 

I also vouch for EXFat, I did it to my NAS, its easier to use whats available to all, them to hack it to work.

 

exFAT all the way. It natively works with Windows Vista, 7, XP SP3, OS X SL, and OS X Lion. All of those OSs can read, write, and format media using exFAT just fine. Additionally, unlike FAT32, you can store files larger than 4GB on an exFAT formatted drive. So you can format the external hard drive in OS X Lion using exFAT, plug it into a Windows machine (with the OSs I previously mentioned), and it will work without any issues. You could also format the hard drive in Windows using exFAT and it will work with your OS X Lion system. I think that is better than using some OS X plug-in especially since ntfs-3g is broken in Lion.

 

Thanks for the tips! I'll see if I try to do that later.

 

In anticipation of my new mac; I tried to format one of my external hdd's partition to exFAT using my office win xp sp3 (installed windows fresh with sp3 already integrated. It is also fully patched and updated. It shows the 'exFAT' option under format properties of the drive but it shows an error whenever I start the formatting using that option... So maybe I thought that xp sp3 cannot format an exFAT so I moved to a win7 PC and formatted there. I went back to my work pc and plugged the newly created exFAT partition and voila! it says this partition needs to be reformatted before use....

I then searched the net and found the windows patch that will allow xp to read exFAT. Installed it and now it is able to read my exFAT... it will be a hassle if I have to install this patch on every xp sp3 machine I want to access my hdd from.

 

exfat is good as long as you only need compatibility on modern operating systems. XP doesn't count as modern. Vista and above for windows, OS X 10.6.5 and above for mac.

If you need legacy compatibility, you have to settle for FAT32, which is pretty terrible. If you don't need mac support out of the box, you can use NTFS. If you don't need windows support out of the box, you can use HFS+.

 

I am not really sure what the problem is. My HP netbook, which is running Windows XP Home SP3 (and fully updated) can read, write to, and format USB media using exFAT just fine. Maybe it has something to do with the way the partition on the hard drive was created. Have you tried using OS X's Disk Utility to erase any partitions on the drive to just make it one partition that is exFAT? Also, have you tried using OS X's Disk Utility to format the partition to see if Windows XP can read it?

MS released a patch for XP that I think is part of SP3 (or shortly after that) which added exFAT compatibility. In fact, on my Windows XP SP3 machines, if I want to format any USB hard drive, I must choose from NTFS or exFAT since XP cannot natively format anything above 32GB using FAT32.

I also have a Toshiba notebook tablet running Windows XP Tablet (essentially XP Pro with a few add-ons) that works fines with exFAT (read, write, format) and one of the desktops at work running XP Pro can do the same with exFAT as well. Although, truth be told, I wouldn't consider XP to be a modern OS (it was released in 2001, a staggering 10 years ago) but many businesses and government groups still use it. In fact, the only reason I have Windows 7 on my 8-core primary desktop at work is because they couldn't find the right drivers for the hardware in the system to get 64-bit Windows XP Pro up and running. They also couldn't put 32-bit Windows XP on there for driver reasons as well as it only reading 3GB of RAM instead of the 12GB that is in there. The government building where I work will finally be upgrading all computers to Windows 7 Pro x64 late next year but, until then, any system that doesn't require Windows 7 will still have Windows XP forcibly installed on it. Modern or not, XP is still pretty strong in terms of systems running it.

 

right now; I have two partitions; one large exFAT and one small NTFS for situations (you never know) that can only access or read NTFS. And the windows patch to read exFAT is on the root of that NTFS partition for easy access

1st question; no i have not; it was originally a 2 NTFS partition.
2nd; no I have not done this.

Well its too late for me anyways as it will take long dreadful hours again to move my files back and forth if I were to format it again (I despise usb 2.0).