portable hdd to use between pc and mac

homeland

homeland

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My older bro is headed to Afghanistan in Jan. and for xmas I wanted to get a portable hdd filled with entertainment for him to pass the time during his 1 year tour. The issue is he is getting a mac laptop to bring with him and I know nothing of macs. So my question is....

If I get a regular portable hdd fill it with movies from my pc... would his mac be able to read the hdd and access the files? Do I need to format the portable hdd first to a more friendly format?


Thanks
 
OSX is HFS+.

Windows is NTFS.

The simple answer is that it should be able to access the files. But I think that HFS+ can only read, but not alter, files on an NTFS formatted HDD. There may be some custom drivers out there that make the file systems more compatible, but I'm not familiar with all of that since I have never owned a Mac.

I'm sure someone here knows more than me though.
 
Aren't all external HDD already formatted in FAT32, and that can be used on either. I don't know much about mac, but I would assume any hdd would be fine.
 
I've got a Seagate 500GB portable drive that I mostly use with my HP desktop, but occasionally we connect it to the MacBook Pro to use for movie viewing...I have had no problems...I haven't had to do anything with the hard drive or with the Mac to make it work...All of my movies are in .ISO format. I'm sure with other formats it would be fine as well. I'm not very technically knowledgeable in this area, just giving you my experience.
 
On your PC:
You can format a drive as HFS+ and install MacDrive on your PC to enable read/write access.

On your Mac:
You can install MacFUSE, which is a read/write NTFS driver for OS X. There are a few others, but their names escape me at the moment. One is developed by Paragon.

Or, as others have said, you can leave it FAT32 and only use files less than 4GB.
 
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