# External Hard drive - mac and pc friendly



## minahrock (Aug 14, 2004)

Hello,

A friend needs to remove about 12 GB of files from my computer (Dell Dimension 8100 Desktop). He will be traveling and would like to be able to access them from both a mac and a pc. 

Does an external drive exist that can be used with both PC and Mac or is it the case that, once the drive is formatted, it can only be used with one or the other? 

If it is only one or the other, would then a virtual hard drive be the solution? There seems to be quite a few and would would love a recommendation.

Thanks,
Annemarie


----------



## Sherry22160 (Jul 17, 2006)

http://www.superwarehouse.com/Smart...B_USB_External_Hard_Drive/USBFLXP60/p/1488776


----------



## kdf (Oct 2, 2006)

If you format the external drive to FAT the Mac will be able to read it and so will the PC. Mac cannot read NTFS.


----------



## Sherry22160 (Jul 17, 2006)

NTFS is read-only under Mac OS X, meaning you cannot change/modify/delete/add files to the hard drive. You can only read them and copy them off of the hard drive.

Leave the drive FAT32 if you wish to be able to both read and write from both Mac and PC.


----------



## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

And keep the partition(s) under 64GB as Fat32 begins to become wasteful of space above that size.


----------



## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

Actually, above 32gigs it's as wasteful as it gets. Once you get there, the clusters are the maximum 32kb size.[WEBQUOTE="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192322/EN-US/"]Partition size Cluster size
-------------------------------------
512 MB to 8,191 MB 4 KB
8,192 MB to 16,383 MB 8 KB
16,384 MB to 32,767 MB 16 KB
Larger than 32,768 MB 32 KB[/WEBQUOTE]


----------



## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

Partition Magic 8+ will push them to 64k that the format allows.


----------



## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

It's a really bad idea to go with non-standard formatting, since you greatly increase the likelihood that you'll experience issues on some systems. I also don't know why you'd want to make the clusters larger, the principal knock on FAT32 with large partitions is the clusters are too big!


----------

