Can anyone recommend a Mac & PC friendly USB Flash Drive?

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pdobek

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I've been searching for a USB flash drive for some time, but I'm hearing that not all work seamlessly between the Mac and PC. Does anyone out there use one on both systems to swap files without any issues? I'm looking for 1GB.

Thanks,
Paul
 

dtravis7


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So far every flash drive I have tried with OSX has just worked. There might be some that do not, but so far I have not run into any. As long as the Flash Drive is formatted in FAT it will work on both XP and OSX just fine. I have a Memorex I picked up cheap at Circuit City a while back. It works great between all my OSX and XP systems.
 
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pcconnection have loads to choose from, just click on any one that you want, scroll down and look for the specfications, should tell you the compatibility, most I have seen support both windows and mac. The prices are also pretty good once the dollars have been converted to pounds.

:) Hope this is helpful :)
 
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... what dtravis said. You'd be hard-pressed to find a flash drive that didn't work with OSX.

Shop by price, and you'll be fine.
 
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Raijer

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dtravis7 said:
As long as the Flash Drive is formatted in FAT it will work on both XP and OSX just fine. I have a Memorex I picked up cheap at Circuit City a while back. It works great between all my OSX and XP systems.

I too have a Memorex, but at this point, it doesn't work at all between my Mac and PC. My PC has a NTFS system, a far better configuration for both security,recovery, and stability reasons on Windows XP, however; Mac's OS X doesn't recognize this format - only the inferior FAT format, as dtravis has mentioned. Not knowing this, I plugged my Memorex flash drive into my Mac and saw a big fat zero. So it's not all as easy as some would have you believe.

My next step is to take my flash drive home, and see if I can configure in a different file system format than my PC hard drive (i.e. FAT). Wish me luck. :mac:
 

dtravis7


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That is insteresting as OSX will READ NTFS just fine. Just not write. Nothing but Windows will do that. My Memorex came out of the package FAT32.

Edit: My new Memorex U3 1GB came FAT32 also. Baggss is correct.
 
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I've gone through 5 or 6 flash drives in the last few years and they were all FAT32 out of the package. I guess Raijer didn't know he could simply format the stick in FAT32 on his Mac instead of doing it on Windows. And don't blame the lack of writing to NTFS on Apple, blame on MS who has not licensed the technology for Apple to integrate.

Come to think of it, even if the stick WAS NTFS, the Mac should have seen it fine, it would simply have been unwritable. Sounds like Raijer may have had other issues...
 
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Raijer

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baggss said:
I guess Raijer didn't know he could simply format the stick in FAT32 on his Mac instead of doing it on Windows.

I think I said as much in my post, but thanks anyway for the "friendly" advice.

baggss said:
And don't blame the lack of writing to NTFS on Apple, blame on MS who has not licensed the technology for Apple to integrate.

Where did I blame Apple? Absoultely nowhere is any blame placed on anyone.

baggss said:
Come to think of it, even if the stick WAS NTFS, the Mac should have seen it fine, it would simply have been unwritable. Sounds like Raijer may have had other issues...

The only real issue I have is coming to this otherwise freindly and helpful board and getting snarky posturing for my trouble.
 

dtravis7


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I feel that Baggss was just trying to help you as was I. I did not take anything he said as trying to hurt or belittle you in any way.
 

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