Using a hard drive with a Mac and PC

[shoddycursive]

I have a question regarding external hard drives. I have a bunch of movies on my WD external hard drive that my friend wants. Since she lives in another state, I figured I would purchase her an external hd, copy the movies over, and mail the hard drive to her. Then I realized she has a PC (I have a Mac), and I am concerned about whether or not this would work. Are there external hard drives that work with both PCs and macs? Would it be possible for me to transfer my movies to a new hd for her, and have it work on her PC?

Thanks!

 

[chscag]

It depends on how large the movies are. FAT-32 formatted drives are compatible to both the Mac and PC, however, there is a file size limitation when using FAT-32. Maximum file size is limited to around 4 GB. Some movies can easily exceed that.

Another option is to purchase a drive formatted to NTFS. NTFS is native to Windows but your Mac will need a special driver in order to write to the drive. The driver will cost $19.95 and can be purchased from here: Paragon NTFS