Need Help With Portable Hard Drive

I need to partition my external hard drive so that I can put large (5-10gb) files onto it, but also maintaining mac-pc portability. I know that partition shout be FAT32, but what about the other, for the larger files? Can this be done on a mac or do I have to use 3rd party software?

FAT-32 is limited to a file size maximum of ~4 Gb and is not a good file system for a large drive because of cluster slack. (wasted space) NTFS would be best to use as it's a journaled file system and does not impose cluster slack.

What operating system are you using on your Mac? I ask because Snow Leopard has the ability to read and write to NTFS formatted drives and partitions. It's not turned on by default but can be easily turned on by using a free graphical terminal utility = NTFSMounter.

If your Mac is using Leopard, you should still format the external drive to NTFS and use a third party driver such as Paragon NTFS. I believe Paragon has it for $39.95 buying direct from them. The boxed set also includes the very handy Mac Browser which allows you to go the other way.

Regards.

Another option would be to format it as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and install MacDrive on your Windows PC so that you can read/write HFS+ drives from Windows.