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External HD questions - Mac+PC simultaneous lovin'?

E

ElektronikSeraph

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
1,663
Alright, so my sister is a budding film geek - currently doing a film course at Evergreen University. They're doing all their editing and such using FinalCut Pro, on Macs. Her personal compy, for now, is an older HP - though she wants to move to Mac with her next one (likely later this year).

And she wants an external hard drive. She wants one for the obvious reasons of backing things up - namely, the video projects she's been doing on her Mac, and her music collection and old essays (English major) from her PC. So she needs an external HD that supports both (leastways for now).

Now there are quite a few external drives (Seagates, WDs) that support both Mac as well as PC, but what about file systems and formatting? Since I doubt both Macs and PCs would be friendly towards reading on the same partition/filesystem, I was thinking I could get the drive, split it in half with one partition NTFS and the other running whatever Mac's system is, so when she plugs it in to either she has at least half the physical disk to work with.

Possible? Yes, no? Will Partition Magic format into Mac's format? I know it'll handle USB/FireWire drives, just don't know about the format. Will my plan of one Winders partition and one Mac partition work? Will I not need it? Thanks in advance.
 
AfterGoogling ;) I found this article. It states
MSDOS
Mac OS X includes support for MSDOS filesystem (FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32).

NTFS
Mac OS X includes read-only support for NTFS.
Click to expand...
Looks like you will be stuck with a FAT32 volume - I suggest you read up on FAT32's numerous limitations, particularly security and partition size before buying an external drive the size of Kansas. and going to town on FAT32. I use FAT formatted partitions only where absolutely necessary for data that must be accessible on multiple operating sytems - if she has data she will only work with on one OS, then she should create a partition in that OS's native file system for that data. Also, if you use multiple native partitions, ensure that neither OS writes anything non-standard to the partition table that will 'break' another OS's access to the drive. One other caution - please don't let her click 'Yes' if she gets prompts about a disk "is not formatted: Would you like to format it now?" - that would be very bad :p
 
The biggest concern with FAT32 would actually be file size limitations. You can only have a 4gb file on FAT32, which may be fine for most people, but it will not allow you to store 2 hours of DVD Quality video in DVD format. Oh, and Windows 2000/XP will only partition FAT32 up to 32GB, even though FAT32 supports WAY more space. I think the line of thought there is that if you need more than 32GB, NTFS is a better file system to use.

Douglite: I thought that FAT32 allowed up to 8tb parititions?

FAT32 Limitations
 
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