Using an External USB HDD

Hello there,

I am buying a Western Digitial (probably) External Hard Disk Drive today. It will either be 250GB or 320GB, depends on how much money I'm going to have with me. I wanted to know what the best way to format it is so it can be 'read and write' on both Macintosh and Windows in the same time. But if that's not possible, then at least Windows only (Windows 7) since that's what I use for games and now games are in huge sizes, just got Call of Duty 6 and it's like 11GBs.

Thanks a lot and have a nice day.

Tarek.

If you want to share the disk between OS X and Windows ( read & write ) then format it as FAT32. The constratint there is that the size of any single file is limited to 4 GB.

If you want to use the disk solely on Windows, format it as NTFS

If you want to use it solely on OS X, format it as HFS+

Hope this helps

Cheers ... McBie

You can also go down the route of NTFS-3G and MacFuse installed on your Mac which will allow you to write to NTFS drives giving you an HD that will work on both computers with no file restraints.

Thanks a lot guys. I will go with the NTFS-3G (which I already have so I can read and write the Boot Camp partition while on Macintosh) and I will just need MacFuse now.

If you've only just recently installed NTFS-3G then it would have installed MacFuse as well.

Dude, you don't want to be running your games off of an external, especially not an external USB drive. Firewire would even suck to game off of, but come on... Drop all your big media on the drive and save room for your games.

Tarek:

I agree with DarkestRitual's advice to you about running games from an external HDD. Even the fastest FW 800 drive will be like watching paint dry on a barn trying to run graphic intensive games. Use your new external for things like storing videos, iTunes library, and for making backups with Time Machine. But not to play games!

Regards.

chscag said:

...watching paint dry on a barn...

Click to expand...

Sounds interesting. Is that a "Game for Windows LIVE" title?