External Hard Drive- PC and Mac

Firstly you should bare in mind i've never bought one of these before and im a total noob at it.

I am looking to buy an external hard drive that can hold fair bit of data as i work in animation so im constantly making huge Maya files, animate pro files, photoshop files etc... and I know how unreliable flash memory is, so I want something I can use in the studio and at home.

I have been looking for one but the one thing they all fail to mention is, can they be used on Windows and Mac? My friend has one that he has to format it everytime he wants to use it on a different operating system. Is there one that will just work on both?

Thanks.

Ok great, thanks guys.

FAT32 works on both, but, if you have extra bucks, check the ethernet network model. This one will stand alone. Any PC/Computer you gave the right to access can access it. It is like a mini file server. Much better if you want to share data between many computers.magicalclick

they work fine but macs can't write to ntfs so you will want to have a small fat32 partition and format most of the drive to ntfs as fat32 doesn't support more than 137gb and is not recommended for large partitions. imprezawrx500

FAT32 works for more than 130 GB although Windows won't fomat if teh drive is more than 32 GB. Third-party utilities can do that. The main problem when using FAT32 is that the file size is limited to 4 GB.

[QUOTE="imprezawrx500"]they work fine but macs can't write to ntfs so you will want to have a small fat32 partition and format most of the drive to ntfs as fat32 doesn't support more than 137gb and is not recommended for large partitions. gigatrainer

[QUOTE="gigatrainer"][QUOTE="imprezawrx500"]they work fine but macs can't write to ntfs so you will want to have a small fat32 partition and format most of the drive to ntfs as fat32 doesn't support more than 137gb and is not recommended for large partitions. imprezawrx500

I've used an NTFS formatted Western Digital Mybook 1TB between Mac OSX, Windows 7 and Linux before. Works great, speedy and reliable.