External Harddrives or microdrives, Mac and PC compatability

[Onefastdak02]

In a nutshell, I have used a mac for the last 3 years, and built my first pc this summer, and I want to transfer files from my mac, and other macs (at school), to my PC. I need a big external drive for work, which means use of both pcs and mac. What do I need to look for a in a external drive that will work with both? I was looking at cases for external hds (with firewire, and usb 2.0), and microdrives (4gig-20gig)(usb2.0). Some say hot swapable, some say works with both OSX and XP, do they work at the same time with both, ie to transfer files from mac to pc, and back? Any recommendations?

 

[BlueWeasel]

The majority of external HD enclosures should work fine on both PC and MAC.

However, if you want to transfer files back and forth from PC to MAC (and vice versa), you probably need to go with FAT32 partitions on the external drive. I'm not a MAC user, but from what I've read, MAC still has issues with NTFS partitions. Apparently, the latest OSX version can read NTFS, but can't write to NTFS partitions.

If you want to be able to work seamlessly between PC and MAC, then FAT32 is the way to go.

 

[Onefastdak02]

Thanks, that's what I will look for!