Question about external harddrive

Hey,

I'm looking to buy an external harddrive for the first time. I'll be using it to store my itunes library, pictures and various documents. Is it possible to use the same for multiple computers or different operating systems? If yes, could you reccommend one to me.

Thanks!

If you want to use an external HD on different operating systems then it has to be formatted to FAT32. This will allow both Mac and Windows to read and write to it. A more complicated way is to have either your Mac or Windows computer read the other operating system's file format with special software.

The benefit of doing the latter is that you don't have the 4GB limit per file size of FAT32. There are lots of good hard drives. Just stay with the popular brands like Seagate, Western Digital, etc and you should find a reliable hard drive.

There are many brands of external hard drives on the market. If you are going to back up data from two different operating systems I would partition the drive to keep the data separate.

Personally I use Seagate drives because they will have Thunderbolt access any time now and I like the extra speed this technology promises. There could be other vendors with the technology already but I am unsure who they are. (If any yet.) I would do some searches on the internet. I use a 1 TB Seagate drive that is partitioned into two partitions. I have my Time Machine backup going to 1/2 and SuperDooper going to the other.

I use a separate drive to back up my Windows machine, though if the drive is large enough I suppose you could have 3 partitions and put everything on one but I think that is risky.

Doing some research on the net will get you educated very quickly. I hope this helps a bit.

Regards,

Pat

PatM said:

If you are going to back up data from two different operating systems I would partition the drive to keep the data separate.

Click to expand...

Partitioning would definitely be one valid option but I didn't mention it because voguefashion334 seemed to not know a lot about all of this so I didn't want to confuse him/her.

If a person is using FAT32 then they can just create two different folders. Each folder would be for the two different operating systems and a third folder could be used for files shared between both. It sounds like voguefashion334 wants to manually copy files over so this method would work. It's when a person is cloning their computers or using Time Machine is when they have to partition if they want to use one hard drive for two different operating systems.

I'm partial to Seagate and Western Digital but I also have a few Iomega drives which seem to work quite well. You can also build your own and save money when there are sales on.

Here are two that are on the 9 to 5 mac site

Review: Western Digital My Book Studio 3TB | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence

Western Digital Elements 2.5TB USB 2 Hard Drive: $100 | 9to5Mac | Apple Intelligence

Both offer a lot of storage for a very low price.