external hard drive: partition for mac and pc

hi. just bought macbook air and am new to mac. i have a 1 TB ext. hard drive (WD) that i have been using with my old windows pc. i can read the info on my mac, but cannot write onto it. is there a way to partition the hard disk so that i can 1/2 can be formatted for pc and 1/2 for mac. or, do i have to erase everything if i want to use it at all to write onto it from my mac. i have only used about 600 GB and the rest is free space. it is mostly movies and i don't want to erase them, just want to be able to use save stuff from mac onto my pc-formatted ext. hard drive. i am pretty computer illiterate, so any help would be appreciated. thanks so much!

I just went through the same ordeal. The external disk has to be formatted fat32 in order to read and write to it. I've read that one has to make sure to "safely remove" the drive from the PC before unplugging it or there can be problems. I have a 500 GB WD passport that I use for Time Machine. My PC won't even "see" it. My 1 TB passport is my music/docs/pictures drive. I had to format it fat 32. My PC and my macbook can both read and write to it.

For me, the much better option is splurge the $20 and get Paragon's NTFS for Mac so that you can write to NTFS partitions.

Depends whether you want easy or free.

Are there noticeable speed differences in the two formats? It takes me about 10 hours to copy all of my music from my PC to my ext drive in either format.

No speed difference in the two formats. The reason it seems slow is because USB isn't nearly as fast as the marketing claims it is. It never EVER reaches anything near its marketed speed (more routinely achieves about 50-60 percent of that speed).

Thunderbolt will (eventually) fix that.

bobtomay said:

For me, the much better option is splurge the $20 and get Paragon's NTFS for Mac so that you can write to NTFS partitions.

Depends whether you want easy or free.

Click to expand...

Or he can get the open-source NTFS-3G, making the decision both easy and free.