External hardrive - pc to mac transfer

troublemaker3

troublemaker3

Active member
i really do not want to lose all my pictures so im going to buy an external hardrive.

my next computer will most likly be a mac and their website says that an external hd is all i will need to transfer files over from a pc

but when i go to best buy they have pc and mac specific ones so im confused, is there any that will work seamlessy on either system

any recomendations under 100 $

 
I used a Lacie 320GB external hard drive to move from my PC to mac, and it worked perfectly. You just have to partition the hard drive so it can work between the two systems, and then you're good to go.
 
you have to have a hard-drive that is formatted with NTFS which will allow you to read and write files on the PC but once you are on a mac you can only read the files. So after you have the files on your mac you can reformat the hard drive that is a journal format or whatever the mac hard drive format is
 
The mac specific drives you saw at best buy have the company's backup software for OSX on them instead of for windows. They are probably formatted for mac too, but that is the only difference. As the guy above me said, natively you can't write to NTFS in OSX, but you can download a plugin called NTFS-3G for OSX which allows you to do this. Link here: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
 
I have an NTFS external drive that i use with my macbook and pcs so i can transfer data between the two. The other option besides NTFS-3G is buying a drive and formatting it for FAT, which OS X and windows can write to, but you have to find a plugin to format a large drive as FAT because there is a cap on the size of a FAT partition you can make. Actually, fuck it. Just buy a non-mac specific external drive and use NTFS-3G. Thats the easiest option.
 
enders.. thanks for that link.. ive got a 300gb media drive for a inoi player on my tv and didnt want to lose all the movies by formatting to FAT.
 
These guys are making things sound way too complicated. Format it FAT32 and it works fine on both. The only time that won't work is if you keep files that are bigger than 4GB which will only happen if you edit big videos.
 
If you're gonna do this format it as FAT on the Mac using disk utility

when you get it. Windows will only create up to 32 gig FAT partitions

without using a workaround.
 
on a sidenote; i only work on a pc and i formatted my FULL harddrive (over 700gig on it!) from fat32 to NTFS without having to back it up or copy it to anywhere + i got the job done in les then 15min ! = succes and i was prety stoked that i didn't need to copy all my files to somewhere else first....
 
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