Mac Forums - View Single Post - Idiot Question About External Hard Drives

baggss · baggss #2 (**permalink**)

07-22-2011, 06:15 PM

Presumably your external drive is formatted as NTFS since it's a Windows drive. By default OSX can read NTFS drives but not write to them. Since you want to use this drive with both OSX and Windows yu have a couple of options:

1) Once you get the mac, copy the files temporarily to the Mac (or the PC) and reformat the drive on the Mac as FAT 32.. This will allow you to use it on both systems but you will be limited to files no larger than 4Gb on the Windows side.

2) Buy an App like Paragon NTFS ($19.99) which will allow your Mac to write to the drive as it currently is. There were some free Apps out there but most of them appear to no longer work with OSX Lion. The current version of Paragon is Lion compatable.

baggss #2 (permalink)
Member Since: Oct 10, 2004 Location: Margaritaville Posts: 10,306 Mac Specs: 27" 3.4 Ghz i7 iMac-13" C2D Macbook-OSX 18.8.2-64Gb iPad 2-32 Gb iPhone 5-ATV 2-14Tb of Storage	07-22-2011, 06:15 PM Presumably your external drive is formatted as NTFS since it's a Windows drive. By default OSX can read NTFS drives but not write to them. Since you want to use this drive with both OSX and Windows yu have a couple of options: 1) Once you get the mac, copy the files temporarily to the Mac (or the PC) and reformat the drive on the Mac as FAT 32.. This will allow you to use it on both systems but you will be limited to files no larger than 4Gb on the Windows side. 2) Buy an App like Paragon NTFS ($19.99) which will allow your Mac to write to the drive as it currently is. There were some free Apps out there but most of them appear to no longer work with OSX Lion. The current version of Paragon is Lion compatable.
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