Idiot Question About External Hard Drives

I've been stalking this forum for a while, knowing that I'd be full of questions before I order my MBP. I am currently using a Windows XP laptop. All of my documents, music stored in iTunes, photos, etc. are on this hard drive. I want to move everything to an external hard drive and leave it on there. I don't want to bog down the MBP with stuff I don't need, especially since my music library is getting rather large.

Will any kind of external hard drive work? I need one that will go back and forth from Windows to OSX... I was reading something on the internet about formats for hard drives, something about it was formatted for Windows so it won't work on Tom, Fred, or Harry's hard drive. I don't remember exactly, hence... I'm asking.

Once I get all this stuff moved & plug the external hard drive into my Mac how do I train iTunes and iPhoto to play nicely with the music and photos stored on the external hard drive?

Presumably your external drive is formatted as NTFS since it's a Windows drive. By default OSX can read NTFS drives but not write to them. Since you want to use this drive with both OSX and Windows yu have a couple of options:

1) Once you get the mac, copy the files temporarily to the Mac (or the PC) and reformat the drive on the Mac as FAT 32.. This will allow you to use it on both systems but you will be limited to files no larger than 4Gb on the Windows side.

2) Buy an App like Paragon NTFS ($19.99) which will allow your Mac to write to the drive as it currently is. There were some free Apps out there but most of them appear to no longer work with OSX Lion. The current version of Paragon is Lion compatable.

baggss said:

Presumably your external drive is formatted as NTFS since it's a Windows drive. By default OSX can read NTFS drives but not write to them. Since you want to use this drive with both OSX and Windows yu have a couple of options:

1) Once you get the mac, copy the files temporarily to the Mac (or the PC) and reformat the drive on the Mac as FAT 32.. This will allow you to use it on both systems but you will be limited to files no larger than 4Gb on the Windows side.

2) Buy an App like Paragon NTFS ($19.99) which will allow your Mac to write to the drive as it currently is. There were some free Apps out there but most of them appear to no longer work with OSX Lion. The current version of Paragon is Lion compatable.

Click to expand...

I don't have an external drive yet. I'm planning on purchasing one soon. So, I buy the drive and I can format it as FAT 32? I don't think I have any files larger than 4GB, so this should work.