Sharing a hard drive between Mac and PC?

[Chiefcrowe]

What is the best way to format a drive or use other software so that I can use a 1 TB external drive interchangeably between a mac and a windows 7 pc?

 

[TheStu]

exFAT will do it.

Or, if you want to spend money, you can get ParagonNTFS for OS X that will let you read/write to NTFS drives from OS X, and read/write HFS drivers from Windows.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

thank you. exFAT is read only on windows if formatted by a mac though, right?

 

[TheStu]

thank you. exFAT is read only on windows if formatted by a mac though, right?

Not that I can recall, no. But it's been a while. There are other issues with it that made it too annoying to work with day in and day out for me, but if you have a blank drive, give it a whirl.

 

[vailr]

Any drive (internal or external) can be formatted by Windows in NTFS, and will be read-only by OSX "natively": without a 3rd-party software requirement. A FAT32-formatted drive has combined: read and write capability natively in both: OSX and Windows. FAT32 has a file size limit of 2 Gb.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Right.. i thought about FAT32 but I would like to use the 1 TB drive as one volume, which won't work with FAT32.

If the external drive is connected via USB, then it can be formatted by Windows in NTFS, and will be read-only by OSX "natively": without a 3rd-party software requirement. A FAT32-formatted USB drive has combined: read and write capability natively in both: OSX and Windows.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Any drive (internal or external) can be formatted by Windows in NTFS, and will be read-only by OSX "natively": without a 3rd-party software requirement. A FAT32-formatted drive has combined: read and write capability natively in both: OSX and Windows. FAT32 has a file size limit of 2 Gb.

You mean 4GB file size limit. (hence the 32)

exfat should work in windows. Else, buy an NTFS driver for osx - I did the latter.

 

[Koing]

Right.. i thought about FAT32 but I would like to use the 1 TB drive as one volume, which won't work with FAT32.

It will work, you will have a file size limit of 4GB which is okay for most people.

Koing

 

[jkroeder]

thank you. exFAT is read only on windows if formatted by a mac though, right?

I recall there being such an issue but if you format it to exFAT on a Windows machine then there shouldn't be a problem

 

[JAG87]

If you want to avoid all problems with exFAT, format the drive in Windows with a cluster size less than 1024K. Otherwise you will have issues.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Thanks everyone for your feedback. I'm going to try to go with 512K and test it out.

EDIT: It seems to work nicely.

If you want to avoid all problems with exFAT, format the drive in Windows with a cluster size less than 1024K. Otherwise you will have issues.

 

[Childs]

thank you. exFAT is read only on windows if formatted by a mac though, right?

No, it shouldn't be a problem. NTFS in OSX is read only without a driver, but exFAT has no restrictions.