want to buy: portable hard drive mac compatible

tentickles666

Hi MSE'rs I need a portable hard drive, it has to be both windows and mac compatible. I think ill need about 500GB and price really is the deciding factor tbh....

I have seen this, does it look like a good deal?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/255186

It comes to £42.46 with shipping and as far as I can tell you cant get any discount codes for ebuyer

Haffiana

Welll....You can format any drive to be either mac or PC compatible, using your mac or pc. So you can buy any drive in any format, irrespective of what the sales blurb says, and change it. That is the easy bit.

However, unless you format it in FAT32, it will not be fully usable by both. It will be readable by both, but you wont be able to add files (write) to the drive with both. If you format in FAT32, then you will be limited to using files of size 4GB or less. This is fine for most things, but large files such as high quality movie files, or HD quality film can be far larger than that. If you only want the drive to store small files, then format the drive in FAT32, and away you go; you can use it fully on any Mac or PC. Most drives are in fact already formatted in FAT32 - the Buffalo drive almost certainly is.

In my opinion, the best option is to format the drive using the mac into HFS+ format (the default mac formatting). Then buy a piece of software for the PC which will allow the PC to write to a mac formatted drive. I use MacDrive on a Windows 7 machine and it works perfectly.

samasina

Haffiana wrote: »

Welll....You can format any drive to be either mac or PC compatible, using your mac or pc. So you can buy any drive in any format, irrespective of what the sales blurb says, and change it. That is the easy bit.

However, unless you format it in FAT32, it will not be fully usable by both. It will be readable by both, but you wont be able to add files (write) to the drive with both. If you format in FAT32, then you will be limited to using files of size 4GB or less. This is fine for most things, but large files such as high quality movie files, or HD quality film can be far larger than that. If you only want the drive to store small files, then format the drive in FAT32, and away you go; you can use it fully on any Mac or PC. Most drives are in fact already formatted in FAT32 - the Buffalo drive almost certainly is.

In my opinion, the best option is to format the drive using the mac into HFS+ format (the default mac formatting). Then buy a piece of software for the PC which will allow the PC to write to a mac formatted drive. I use MacDrive on a Windows 7 machine and it works perfectly.

Could the OP not just format the drive in the 1st instance and format one part into HFS+ and the other into FAT32?

*Not questioning your suggestion, just want to know if my suggestion is actually viable*

Haffiana

Yes, it is possible to format into two partitions, each with different formats. However this won't solve the problem of not being able to access the same material on a mac and a pc. It would be easier to buy two smaller cheaper drives.