External HD question/problem

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BEEEsH

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I have an external hard drive that I purchased today. Its a 250gb Comstar. I formated it on my PC to NTFS and it works great with my PC. I'm able to copy and transfer my files with ease (and its fast too).

I have connectivity with my mac, but when I attempt to put files onto the HD it says that the drive cannot be modified. How can I change this?
 
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1.67 Ghz 17" PB w/1 GB Ram; 400 MHz PM G4, 366Mhz iBook Firewire, Nano 4GB Black
I always get these mixed up, so somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe macs can only read NTFS, they can't write to them. I do believe that they can both read and write to Fat32 though.
 
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BEEEsH

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rs2sensen said:
I always get these mixed up, so somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe macs can only read NTFS, they can't write to them. I do believe that they can both read and write to Fat32 though.

I had it as FAT32 before, but I noticed that for some reason it was really slow. Is it just me or is there a difference in speed between NTFS and FAT32?
 
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You need to have it at FAT32 if you want to be able to read/write on both windows and and os x
 
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I had the same problem with my External HDD, I eventully got fustrated and formated it to NFS+ (Mac native file system) and left it at that. I would recommend using it on one system, not both. FAT32 had a problem with files over 4gb in size as well. So keep that in mind.
 
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BEEEsH

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trpnmonkey41 said:
You need to have it at FAT32 if you want to be able to read/write on both windows and and os x

How is it that when its networked with my PC, I have read & write privileges?
I'm happy with accessing it through the PC, the only problem is that the computer uses USB1 and transfer rates are really slow.
 

dtravis7


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Because, Your PC has Windows XP or 2k and IT'S doing the reading and writing with the drive. The Mac is using TCP/IP and talking to the PC via the network. The Mac with OSX nor Linux can at the present time not write to an NTFS drive plugged into the Mac or linux system. The PC is doing the work. FAT32 is not that much slower if at all than NTFS. There is a 4GB file size limitation though as already has been pointed out. If you want the drive to work properly with both Windows and OSX, format it Fat32. It will work fine on both systems. Get a USB 2 card for your PC. USB 1.1 is way to slow for any large file transfers!!
 

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