External HDD

Kido

Can anyone tell me if I can use an external HDD on both Macbook Pro (OSx) and Windows 7 PC. I've got a lot of files on my PC that I'd like to transfer to my Macbook and vice versa. Do I need to look out for anything special or will a cheap one do?

esuhl

You just need to make sure that the filesystem is compatible with both operating systems... but you can re-format the drive with whatever filesystem so it doesn't matter how the drive is formatted when you buy it.

FAT32 works with Windows, and I believe it's compatible with OSX (although it has a few restrictions on partition size and I think the maximum file size is 4GB).

NTFS also works with Windows, but it used to be read-only on Unix-based machines... Linux has drivers (ntfs-3g) that allow NTFS filesystems to be written to, but I know nothing about Macs, so I don't know if this would be possible.

This page suggests using FAT32: http://superuser.com/questions/263581/how-to-use-external-hard-disk-in-both-windows-and-mac-os-x

Or, if you want to use HFS+ (which I assume is the standard Mac filesystem), you can purchase drivers for Windows: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system#OS_X

almillar

As above.
FAT32 is getting really dated now with that 4GB file size limit.
There IS software for Mac that lets you read and write NTFS partitions, you can get it free with some hard drives. Paragon (see above) make it.

epm-84

What you will find if you are using the same drive on a PC and Mac is small weird system files appearing in folders with your actual files. If you were using the drive on a PC only or Mac only they would remain hidden.