I would like to purchase an external hard drive to back-up the data on my laptop and to store home videos for editing through iMovie. I was debating if I needed to connect it with Firewire 400 or USB 2.0, as far as speed is concerned. I have learned from another thread, the USB 2.0 is fast enough to save/edit the movie directly from the camera through iMovie onto the external hard drive. Plus someone made a good point, which I forgot, and that was I am already using the one Fire400 connector on my Macbook Pro to connect my video camera to so, I have to use the USB 2.0 connection.
Ok, so here is my new question. I am primarily buying this external drive for my Mac but it would be nice to be able to also hook it up to my wife's Windows machine to back up her files. So what are my options for how to format the drive. From what I have read, it needs to be formatted in FAT32 in order for my Mac and my wife's PC to be able to read and write to it, but from reading other post the FAT32 can be problematic (some guy lost all of his stuff when he did not properly eject the drive before powering down) and there are file size limitation (I read some were 4GB). The best option for the Mac appears to be HFS+ (which I assume is the native Mac File system). So if I use that file system, I am assuming that I will not be able to plug the drive directly into my wife's Windows machine. I don't have much of a problem with that, if I am able to connect the drive to my Mac, share it over the network and then connect to the drive on her Windows machine and copy the 500 Meg to 1 GIG or so of data that she cares about. I am primarily going to be using this hard drive on my Mac, so what are my options?
Thanks in advance,
Richard
Ok, so here is my new question. I am primarily buying this external drive for my Mac but it would be nice to be able to also hook it up to my wife's Windows machine to back up her files. So what are my options for how to format the drive. From what I have read, it needs to be formatted in FAT32 in order for my Mac and my wife's PC to be able to read and write to it, but from reading other post the FAT32 can be problematic (some guy lost all of his stuff when he did not properly eject the drive before powering down) and there are file size limitation (I read some were 4GB). The best option for the Mac appears to be HFS+ (which I assume is the native Mac File system). So if I use that file system, I am assuming that I will not be able to plug the drive directly into my wife's Windows machine. I don't have much of a problem with that, if I am able to connect the drive to my Mac, share it over the network and then connect to the drive on her Windows machine and copy the 500 Meg to 1 GIG or so of data that she cares about. I am primarily going to be using this hard drive on my Mac, so what are my options?
Thanks in advance,
Richard