What's a Portable Hard Drive (1tb) that is formatted and will work with both WIndows and Mac?

Daniel

I have a MacBook and a windows computer, which I would like to back them both up on the same portable hard drive (and also be able to use the hard drive (adding and copy stuff on it(all the normal stuff you'd do with one)) with both windows and mac)
I have a WD Passport Essential SE 1tb at the moment and It is formatted with windows and is only Read Only for Mac because it is formatted with windows, What is a portable hard drive which I can use on both Windows and Mac.
Please help with fairly simple instructions :)

Answer
Hi,

You can use any external Hdd. Just setup two partitions on it. :) but If you don't wanna do that:

You'd need to format it to FAT32, for it to be able to read and write it on both operating systems. But you can't transfer any files larger than 4GB to it, so you should be aware of that limitation.

I'm pretty sure there are drivers/emulators out there for reading any mac filesystem on your win and vice versa.

Hope this helped :)

Mac Portable Hard Drive Help?

h8thecause

I recently bought a SimpleTech portable hard drive. Its a 160gb if that matters. I am working on trying to backup my music by dragging and dropping it on there, but when I plug it in and try to drag, it does not allow me. When I view the info for the portable hard drive, the sharing and permissions says: "I can only read". How would I fix this?

Answer
Check whether the hard disk has "Write Lock". If it is so make sure it is not write locked.

Make sure that the Hard Drive is not formatted as NTFS. Mac does not support writing data to a NTFS volume. Just right click the mounted volume in Finder and select "Get Info". In the Info window check for the "Format:". In case the format is NTFS, it shows "Windows NT Filesystem". [ http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/attachments/maccar/40138d1172094097-using-external-hd-between-mac-pc-picture-1.png ].
If it is so, your Mac will not allow you to write data to that volume.

There are 2 solutions :
1. Make Mac write data to NTFS volume : Install 3rd party NTFS support for Mac. Softwares like "Paragon NTFS" [ http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ ] allows you to write data to NTFS volume.
2. Reformat the hard disk to Mac Compatible format : This will require you to erase the entire data present in the disk. You can use Disk Utility to reformat the hard disk. If you are not sharing it with Windows PC, you can format it with format as "HFS+" (referred as "Mac OS Extended" in disk utility). In case you intend to share it with Windows "Fat32" will be the format I would recommend. Remember Fat32 does not support files larger than 4GB.

I would recommend the second solution.

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Title Post: What's a Portable Hard Drive (1tb) that is formatted and will work with both WIndows and Mac?
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