hard drive docking caddy to use for applemac and window pc

[mankman2012]

Hi I was looking to save a bit of money by buying this hard drive caddy to be used with my normal windows PC and an applemac. Would it be possible to do this? Is there any free softwares I can use with this item to do this?

 

[Harvey]

Any drive you insert in the docking caddy should appear as a normal USB connected drive, regardless of whether you connect it to a PC or a Mac. You shouldn't need any software to read from or write to the drive.

If you intend to clone a drive in your machine to it, you will need software for that purpose. Acronis True Image works well for PC's. I've heard that Carbon Copy works for Mac's, but I'm not a Mac user so I can't confirm that from personal experience.

Cloning a drive through a USB port takes much longer than cloning to a drive connected directly to a SATA or PATA port in the machine because the transfer rate is so much slower via USB. For example, cloning my desktop drive takes about 20 minutes while cloning my laptop drive through a USB 2 port takes almost three hours.

 

[mfenn]

USB HDDs will work on both Mac and Windows without issue.

The bigger problem is which file system you format the drive with. If you format the drive in Windows as NTFS, you will need to put some additional software on your Mac in order to be able to read and write files. Instead, I recommend formatting it on the Mac as exFAT, which can be read by both Mac and Windows.