External hard drives

[rookie]

I have backed up my photos to an ext hd from windows pc.the question is can I now use this ext hd with my apple mac pro or do I need to buy a new one. I know little when it comes to computers.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
wayne

[red99td5]

Have you formatted the drive since you got it? The std format for external drives (or is was 2 yrs ago when i used to sell them) was fat32. This can be read by either pc or mac. If you have formatted it then chances are it would have been formatted as ntfs, which mac's cant read.

Aaron

[junqbox]

If you want to use the TimeMachine function on the Mac, then no, unless you create 2 partitions on the HDD. It may be easier to buy a second dedicated drive for Mac.

[ameerat42]

Isn't there a facility in Macs that lets them read NTFS formats (maybe not boot up from them) or something that emulates a Win OS?
Um?

[ameerat42]

Look. This bugged me so much I called up a mate who ALWAYS copies pics from an NTFS partition on a dual-booting MacBook Pro. He uses Paragon NTFS
and swears by it.

If you were driven to swearing at it, you can now stop and give it a go.
s
Am.

[Xenedis]

The article 1 External Hard Drive for your Mac and PC nicely explains the situation.

In short, your Mac can read an NTFS-formatted drive, but cannot write to it, unless you've purchased some third-party software to do it.

I only run a Mac, and don't need Windows PCs to read my disks, so I've formatted them all using Mac OS X's native format (HFS+).

If you need both machines to read and write to your disk, you'll either need to format the disk as FAT32, or buy some external software for either machine to write to the other machine's disk format.

I don't consider that ideal at all.

If you're going to use some backup software (eg, Time Machine), you'll need a dedicated disk per machine.

If you're just going to manually drag files and directories to the disk in order to copy them, and need both machines to do the same thing with one disk, FAT32 will work.

[Clubmanmc]

the only let down is that FAT32 has size limitations with Drive sizes...

M

[Xenedis]

the only let down is that FAT32 has size limitations with Drive sizes...

FAT32 has a 4GE per-file size limitation.

Depending on what you're doing (high-res video, for instance), that may or may not be a problem.

[rookie]

Thank you all very much for replying I will try and get my head around it all.

[rookie]

The article 1 External Hard Drive for your Mac and PC nicely explains the situation.

In short, your Mac can read an NTFS-formatted drive, but cannot write to it, unless you've purchased some third-party software to do it.



I only run a Mac, and don't need Windows PCs to read my disks, so I've formatted them all using Mac OS X's native format (HFS+).

If you need both machines to read and write to your disk, you'll either need to format the disk as FAT32, or buy some external software for either machine to write to the other machine's disk format.

I don't consider that ideal at all.

If you're going to use some backup software (eg, Time Machine), you'll need a dedicated disk per machine.

If you're just going to manually drag files and directories to the disk in order to copy them, and need both machines to do the same thing with one disk, FAT32 will work.

Thanks Xenedis for the link very helpful. The mud is getting a bit clearer