External HD Format?

I have an external drive at home, but my job got me a pc that has windows xp on it. I want to buy a more portable external drive so I can take my music to work and listen through iTunes. If I format it as FAT32 through my mac will it be compatible? I only want the PC to read from the drive not write to. I also read that formatting this way limits files to 4GB or less. Is this just individual files or will it hold my entire music library (20GB total, but no individual file that large)?

Thanks - thomas

FAT32 is universally compatible, but note that you'll want to format it with OS X. Windows imposes an artificial limitation of a 32GB partition size. You are correct that your individual file sizes will be limited to 4GB.

My advice would be to either pick up MacDrive for Windows (this allows a Windows machine to read/write a Mac-formatted drive) or pick up Paragon NTFS for Mac. Either one of these products will eliminate the compatibility issues and allow you to use a more modern filesystem. FAT32 was discontinued for good reason, it's generally more prone to fragmentation and corruption.

FAT32 is your best bet as it can be written to and read from both your Mac and PC. That 4GB limit is for individual files, not total (which would be kinda silly if you think about it).

I would suggest getting a travel drive that doesn't have an AC adapter, like the Western Digital Passport or the Seagate FreeAgent Go.

I have a WD Passport, that was compatible with my MAC and PC, then I erased everything on it with my MAC, and it was no longer recognized by my PC. I then downloaded a utility from Western Digital (to my PC) that allowed me to restore the FAT32 format, and it's back to what I wanted; read/writable on both PC and Mac. So be careful, but it can be fixed. (and data can be saved; just copy to a MAC storage device first).

If you don't want the silly limitations FAT32 imposes, there are ways to make your Mac able to both read and write to NTFS-formatted volumes.