portable hard drives for office with Mac & PC?

[Erika Epstein]

I have both a mac and a pc and I would like to purchase new external portable hard drives that will work on both platforms. The small flash drives I use work on both platforms without doing anything. The portable hard drives seem to be platform specific.

I am unclear as to what reformatting if any I may need to do. Some mac edition ones say they need reformatting for use with pc, but does this then make them unusable for macs?

Similarly if I get a pc portable hard drive it says I need to reformat for use with mac. Is the drive no longer good for pcs?

I use them for backup storage where one is always at the bank and switch them out each week.

Can anyone clarify what, if anything, I need to do? I was looking at the Iomega and Western Digital, but open to others. The Seagates I have are pc specific. Dont' ask how I am getting around the problem now, too embarrassing

[Dwight]

For my operation, having recently expanded my machines to include a PC [boo] to drive a 2Gb ATI graphics card [for MachStudio],
I use a network RAID drive.

WIthout specifically recommending it, I'm using a LaCie:

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11140


1: Distance: Put the drive in a hidden secure place wherever a network cable can go.

2: Raid 1: duplicates data on mirrored drives - swap out a failed drive.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Dwight's NAS (network-attached storage) is a reasonable, neutral option.

I've got firewire and USB external drives.

You can ignore the 'for mac' and 'for pc' aspect at one level - this just refers to the factory formatting and what software is pre-loaded on the drive. For Mac people with 10.5 or later, they have Time Machine and don't need backup software. PC users and earlier Mac users may want the provided software.

The formatting is the main thing.

A FAT32-formatted drive can be read by both OS X and Windows, but you cannot write any files larger the 2 GB onto it. (This would generally only limit you if you have big video files, virtual machine files, or ISO disk images of DVDs, etc.)

A NTFS-formatted drive is the main choice for Windows. But, it can only be read by OS X, not written (without 3rd party software).

For OS X, the desired drive format is OS Extended (Journaled) - but this cannot be read by Windows (without 3rd party software).

You can partition your external drive into two (or more) virtual drives, each with its own format. I find it easiest to partition on the Mac using Disk Utility, since partitioning on Windows is still primitive without someone else's product to assist.

If you are just concerned about backups, then the two-partition solution with an NTFS partition and an OS X Extended (Journaled) partition would do the trick. Copy the software delivered on the external drive onto your computer first before partitioning (erasing) and then copy the software back to the appropriate (windows or mac) partition.

If you want to share files, then make one of the partitions FAT32 - which will let either OS read/write files of size up to 2 GB. I did this on my portable external drive so that I had access to all of my projects, Artlantis/etc media on my old Windows laptop which has a too-small internal HD.

Lots of possible scenarios...

I have not tried it, but there is a free add-on for Windows that lets Windows read OS X partitions - which might then be the best bet.
It's called HFSExplorer:
http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html
but it is READ only. So, you could not write to the partition from Windows.

MacDrive $49.95:
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
sounds like it can allow both reading AND writing, so might be an option if you want your external drive formatted as just one partition in Mac OS X format.

Karl

[Erika Epstein]

Dwight & Karl,
Thank you. Thank you Thank you.
FAT32.
One other facet is I am considering a 3rd external drive to function as the server for all my files that both machines read from. If I understood correctly, I would need that drive to be FAT32 so both machines could read/write with it. Correct?

And would this drive be an ethernet drive as opposed to these USB?
Theoretically, if I had this ethernet drive then I would just be backing up this drive, not the two computers.

[Eduardo Rolon]

Karl, you forgot Macfuse which lets OSX read and write to NTFS and is free.

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23729#descContainer_link

If you use VMWare's Fusion you should have it already installed. Getting bit by the 2Gb limit of FAT32 is not funny.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Thanks, Eduardo. I saw the MacFuse reference when googling, but wasn't sure about putting it up since I have MacFuse installed, yet I could only read NTFS, not write to it. (Of course, from inside Parallels itself I can read/write external NTFS drives.)

I found this reference to another driver:
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/index.html

but the whole things seems pretty geeky...?

Erika: if your new, 3rd drive that is going to have your common files is a network-attached drive, then, no, you definitely do not want FAT32 - because of the max size (2 GB) and reliability (low) issues with that format. With a network attached drive, the client computers do not need to even know what format the drive is ... the drive itself handles that with hardware between the disk and the ethernet port. A networked drive looks like a server, basically. Just like network printers have an advantage over printers plugged into a computer and shared on the network in that no host computer has to be turned on to print ... so a networked disk drive is always available to any computer on your network, vs an external drive that is plugged into a computer and made visible to the network (which then requires that the host computer be turned on).

Apple's Airport Extreme provides a USB plug to plug in an external drive and make it available to a network; their Time Capsule is pretty much the same thing but with a built in drive. But, I imagine the drive is Mac-formatted in each case and if you don't need a new wireless base station, either is overkill. While both have 3 ethernet ports for wired connections, wireless access to a hard drive would be s-l-o-w for real work (OK for backups).

You can see various NAS (network-attached storage) options from OWC here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/NAS/Ethernet
the cheapest being just an enclosure that you can put your own hard drive into.

Does anyone have experience with these things on 1 GB vs 100 MB ethernet networks to know if performance with 1 GB ethernet is substantially better?

Karl



Karl