Question re: external HDD

I'm strongly considering getting a Macbook & dumping XP for home use. A big consideration is that I have all my music & a ton of pics on an external hard drive (formatted in NTFS). I keep the ext. drive as a backup, and would like to access the files from the Mac, if not write to the drive as well.

As I Googled one article mentioned using NTFS for Mac so the Macbook can read from & write to the ext. HDD NTFS drive. Is it as easy as it sounds? Anyone here used NTFS for Mac, or have suggestions on this topic?

From my experience, NTFS works fine. Just plug it in, you know?

By default, OS X can only read from a NTFS drive. It can not write to it.

However, there is third party software which can enable read and write access to NTFS. (pay ware) If you purchase a new Mac it will be loaded with OS X Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard can read and write to NTFS, however, it is not turned on by default. You have to turn it on with several terminal commands or use a small utility which will do it for you.

When you purchase your Mac, log back on here and ask about what I mentioned above. Or you can send me forum private mail.

Regards.

Well I switched about 4 months ago and using an external HDD was easier than I imagined. I had a WD Passport drive that I decided to use and just plugged it in. The Mac asked me if I wanted to use it as my Time Machine backup and I just said yes. Time Machine is the easiest and BEST backup software I've ever used. I highly recommend that you use it. It's literally a brainless endeavor, not that I'm suggesting you're brainless. It just so easy that it does everything for you once you get it set up.

chscag said:

If you purchase a new Mac it will be loaded with OS X Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard can read and write to NTFS, however, it is not turned on by default. You have to turn it on with several terminal commands or use a small utility which will do it for you.

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Are all external hard drives NTFS by default? I have a Hitachi 1TB external hard drive that I'm pretty sure is NTFS. Is it pretty easy to set Snow Leopard to read and write to NTFS (what terminal commands / utility are you talking about)? I always heard that it had to be FAT32 and partitioned in certain sizes.