Compatibility of Hard drive with heavy duty usage

Hi. I have a Hard Drive which was formatted on Windows as FAT32. This presents no issue as I can transfer files between both Mac and windows. The biggest problem is that I want to transfer disk image files over 4g (about 6-7gb) to the hard drive as backup. With the FAT32 format I can't. To use any of the other formats through which I am allowed to transfer big files I lose the usage on windows which is something I can't afford seeing as I have to sync between laptop and university desktops. Is there a way to do this? I've read on other posts that I can partition the USB. I did but didn't understand what happened. I uploaded on my Mac some files and then when I went to windows it told me I have to format it to use it. Can anyone explain this please? Thanks.
p.s. it was partitioned as mac os extended

Newer versions of Windows use the NTFS filesystem. Mac OS X supports NTFS, but in read only mode. There are a number of different ways to address this:

1. Format the drive as NTFS on Windows. Then, install a driver on the Mac that can read and write to NTFS.

There's a few different options -

* Snow Leopard (10.6) has experimental support for NTFS write functionality, but you need to run a Terminal command to enable it - currently it's unsupported, so you run the risk of data loss.

* You can purchase Paragon NTFS for Mac, which does a great job with NTFS, it also contains a driver for Boot Camp so that you can read/write to your Mac-formatted drives using HFS+ on Windows. Very handy.

* You can try the free NTFS 3G with MacFUSE, but I'm told that this can be kludgy too.


2. You can format the drive HFS+ ("Mac OS X Extended" in Disk Utility) and use MacDrive on Windows to read/write to the disk.

3. If the two machines are setup on a network, you can use file sharing to bypass the hard drive altogether and just transfer over the network.

First off, thanks.

cwa107 said:

Newer versions of Windows use the NTFS filesystem. Mac OS X supports NTFS, but in read only mode. There are a number of different ways to address this:

1. Format the drive as NTFS on Windows. Then, install a driver on the Mac that can read and write to NTFS.

Click to expand...

Like which driver?

TheIdiots said:

First off, thanks.

Like which driver?

Click to expand...

I do believe he covered all the options.

cwa107 said:

Newer versions of Windows use the NTFS filesystem. Mac OS X supports NTFS, but in read only mode. There are a number of different ways to address this:

1. Format the drive as NTFS on Windows. Then, install a driver on the Mac that can read and write to NTFS.

There's a few different options -

* Snow Leopard (10.6) has experimental support for NTFS write functionality, but you need to run a Terminal command to enable it - currently it's unsupported, so you run the risk of data loss.

* You can purchase Paragon NTFS for Mac, which does a great job with NTFS, it also contains a driver for Boot Camp so that you can read/write to your Mac-formatted drives using HFS+ on Windows. Very handy.

* You can try the free NTFS 3G with MacFUSE, but I'm told that this can be kludgy too.

Click to expand...