Window's external HDD working with a mac?

Hi, I was wondering if there is a way of using an external HDD for both a windows and apple laptop? Because from what I have read the difference in file format makes this impossible.

Thanks for any help.

 

i have 320GB external USB/esata HDD formated as NTFS works fine in any OS win osx linux

i was wondaring do mac have esata adapter
like TB>esata or not right now

 

I don't see why it would be impossible. I use a USB flash drive to transfer files (sometimes folders with subfolders) from my Windows machine at work to my OSX machine at home, and it works just fine. A USB external HDD should be the same, I think.

 

Oh, I read alot of things saying that it wouldnt work - this is good news. Would it matter that the hard drive has encryption software - could this not work with a mac os?

 

I'll check the flash drive thing again this evening when I get home, to make sure I'm not remembering this wrong and misleading you. I've got the "my documents" folder from my Windows partition from my MBP on a USB flash drive right now, so I'll pop it in and see if I can navigate through the subdirectories and open documents.

I don't know much about encryption software, so I can't answer that question specifically.

 

Not true.

NTFS formatted hard drives cannot be written to in Mac OS X. In other words, while you can copy files off of a NTFS hard drive, you can't copy files onto a NTFS hard drive.

Use FAT32 for compatibility, even though FAT32 does have restrictions on file size and drive size.

Hacks and tricks exist to enable NTFS writing, but they certainly aren't endorsed by Apple. They also can be gimmicky at times.

 

So I can get everything of the HDD on to the mac?

 

format the drive with NTFS and use the NTFS-3G application to get write ability or format EXFAT. if the drive is encryped it is doubtful the MBP can read it.

FAT 32 is certantly not reccomended anymore

not yet it may come later on TB perpherals are VERY limited right now to an external RAID array, and Apples TB screens
if you have an older MBP with an expresscard slot you can put in an expresscard to USB3 or ESATA card.

 

Macs can only read/write natively to HFS, and Windows can only read/write natively to NTFS.

If you want a drive to be able to Read and Write from both OS's you can just format your external drive to exFat. I have my internal Optibay hard drive formatted to exFat and I can put both my Windows and Mac files on it without any other applications.

 

incorrect that is the default used for installation but both OS's can natively read and write many disk format natively specifically both OS's support FAT16, FAT32 EXFAT. OSX also supports most Linux file systems such as ext2/ext3

 

I just checked and apparently this is correct. I never knew Macs can read and write to NTFS partitions. Apparently this has been a feature in 10.6. Although it is not enabled by default and apparently needs to be enabled via termini.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

 

it could also be enabled by installing a third party application such as ntfs-3g since atleast 10.4

 

Right, what I was stating that instead of using an application or having to activate it, you could use exFAT which supports read write out of the box without any applications or activation just format and use.

 

I don't recommend installing ntfs-3g in Lion as it is having issues. I had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops just to remove it (since I kept getting errors from ntfs-3g when booting into OS X saying that my Bootcamp partition could not be mounted) by entering all sorts of commands in the terminal.

I still think that exFAT is the best file system for formatting hard drives for both Windows (XP SP3 and above) and OS X as that is something natively fully supported by both platforms. NTFS support can be tricky as enabling write support through the terminal can produce wonky results and third party programs (such as ntfs-3g) are either buggy in general or are having compatibility issues with Lion. OS X can read NTFS formatted drives so I recommend copying everything off of an NTFS formatted hard drive, reformatting it using exFAT, and then copying everything back.

Then you will have absolutely no issues reading and writing data to the hard drive under OS X or Windows.