What's the best way to share an external hard drive between a mac and pc?

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hook it up to the pc and share it. make sure your pc and mac are on the same workgroup. use finder's network browser to browse to the pc and then authenticate to the shared drive. ta da!

#435671

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#435676

Hang on a min.

This all depends on what format the HD drive is?

Remember if its in Mac Format HFS, The PC will not be able to read any of those files and will want to format the HDD, Unless you are using a third party application on the PC called Macdrive or something similair.

However if the HDD is in PC format (FAT32 or NTFS) then the mac will happily read and write(FAT32 Only) to it without any drama.

same goes for ipods, a Mac will happily exchange data with a PC formatted iPod in iTunes, But a PC will have nothing to do with an Apple Formatted iPod.

#435775

Macs can't write on NTFS formatted drives. Only FAT32.

#435776

yep yep, just format the hard drive with fat32 and it'll work under both os's, unless you want to be extra and have an ntfs partition and hfs+ partiton on it too..

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you made me spill my drink haha

#435783

yup, my bad for omitting the formatting stuff. thx for picking up the slack for me.

#435788

The only snag you might get (depending on what type of files your intending on using on this 'shared' drive) is that FAT32 supports file sizes upto 4GB only.

I use Macdrive and keep the external drive as HFS, its the more effective way to do it , but it really does depend on your use of the drive.

Just thinking out loud... NTFS obviously has its advantages over FAT32, but the ***** is nothing really supports it outside of windows, even linux has issues with it, I wonder if Leopard 10.5 will offer any surprises??

I saw that they have appeard to introduce the ZFS file system to it, I suppose its a case of watch that space :slant:

#435789