plugging in my formerly win usb drives to a mac

This may display my total ignorance, but here goes....I am switching to mac (thank god) after too many years as a windows sufferer. All of my data files reside on my usb hard drives. When I get the mac, and plug in the drives, will they need to be reformatted, or will they simply work? These drivers are full of photoshop, flash and other graphic files.....can't afford to lose them, although of course I have backed them up....thanks for any help on this.

The Mac should recognize the drives fine and display them. Your problem will be that if they are in NTFS format, the Mac can read them but not write to them. If you want to continue to use them for both Windows and Mac you'll have to reformat them as FAT-32. If you want to use them just for Mac you can copy the data off them and reformat as HFS+ and then put the data back on them.

Thanks baggss, that's good information.

Do you think os x will ever be able to read/write ntfs.. as a future switcher (waiting for an imac but having 2 others win-pc in the house) i wouldn't want to leave a 500 gig HD as FAT-32, not that much stable...

No. MS has declined to license NTFS to Apple for whatever reason. Based on that it seems unlikely that they will ever license it or any other "new" file format they come up with.

el_lasso said:

Do you think os x will ever be able to read/write ntfs.. as a future switcher (waiting for an imac but having 2 others win-pc in the house) i wouldn't want to leave a 500 gig HD as FAT-32, not that much stable...

Click to expand...

There is no difference in stability between the two. If you are referring to security then sure NTFS is more secure, but it doesn't really make a difference on your Mac since they use completely different permissions.