moving large amounts of data from the pc

hi guys..i made the switch almost a decade ago, but i have a funny situation now. When i first came to the mac, i had to move a bunch of data from the pc to the mac. The dilemma back then was my external drive was formated to windows and the mac could not write to it (or maybe it was read, i can not remember)- anyway, today, i find myself back in a similar place, trying to move loads of data (about 30 gbs) from a pc onto an external hd. But, my question is, has this changed since 10 years ago. If i go out and by a new hd, solely to house this data, what should i do? Format it to windows? I was thinking of getting a 250gb drive, which would eventually be used only by the mac

I have an old Powerbook G4- next January, i plan to get a new mac, which means i can have that windows capability, but i am not looking for workarounds, unless it is my only option.

I believe Macs can see an NTFS partition, but not write to it. I'm not 100% sure though. Windows completely ignores Mac partitions.

Your best bet would probably be to format the external drive as FAT32 so that both the Mac and Windows can read/write to it. (I'm not sure if there are size limitations to FAT32 - I don't know if it can be 250gb) Once the data is transferred over, you can reformat the external drive to Mac since you won't be going back and forth anymore. Hope this helped - it's pretty late.

If you want to just transfer from Windows to Mac, then you CAN make it NTFS cause OS X can read but not write to NTFS.

If you want to transfer to and fro, you format it to Fat32 (which is the default which most external HDDs come with) and it should work well. However, remember that FAT32 can't create files larger than 4GB so if you have some really large files, NTFS is your only way.

You can also use MacDrive which allows windows to read and write to Mac HFS partitions

You can use NTFS for mac by paragon software to enable write capabilities for NTFS on Mac...

Stick with FAT32 when moving files between Windows and OS X. That way you have both read and write access on both operating systems. However, if you have files that are larger than 4GB, then like CArmstrong said, you'll need to stick with NTFS. You won't be able to write to it from OS X, but at least you'll be able to transfer files.

To be honest, the best way to handle this would be via Ethernet. You'll be able to transfer that 30GB in no time, far faster than using an external drive. All you need is a regular Ethernet cable and an ability to follow simple directions ;P

thanks all....just really quick, in the end, these files are not going onto the mac...i just want to remove them from the PC and then 'house' them on the hd...so, there is the root...if i format to NTFS, then i can't write later, which means, i am still in a similar position. But if i go with FAT32, i am limited to any files larger than 4gb....i will have to weigh both options....but you all helped huge! Thanks

gotta hide the porn eh?Why not just burn the files to dvd?

Try NTFS for mac. Right now it is in BETA stage but it might cost somewhere $20 when it's out. It works quite well for me...

the route I went down was getting some NAS enclosures, if I didnt have the drives already, I would have just gotten a NAS Drive instead.

accessing the nas drives via smb and wirelessly is problematic for me, as it randomly disconnects, and then renders the MBP unusable until it either recovers eventually, or I get bored and do a hard shutdown, however, accessing them via ftp is flawless.

so that is another option worth checking out.