External Hard Drive

[m2gc]

Hey All

I was wondering if I buy an external hard drive am I able to unplug it from my powerbook and then plug it into my pc and be able to access the same media like songs and such?

 

[mikelao]

i have one setup like this and it works fine. the only thing is the HD should be formatted in FAT32 (i think) so it'll work fine in both windows and mac.

 

[ipacmm]

Just make sure the hard drive is both firewire and usb..unless you have a firewire port on the windows computer.

 

[khisayruou]

I have a usb external hdd, formated fat32.
Both os read them just fine.

The only thing to keep in mind, if you are going with
a 2.5 inch external, the powerbook does not supply enough
power through the usb (not sure how it is with firewire, if
someone can post on that). The larger externals should
be externally powered so it wouldnt be a problem.

 

[Danksi]

I also understand that there's an individual file size restriction with FAT32, of around 4Gb. May not be a problem, depending on what you're planning to do with the drive.

 

[lieb39]

If you are dealing with file sizes larger then 4GB on the mac side of the system only, you could always partition the drive to have a FAT32 + HFS volume on it, so it would be two drives essentially on your mac, and on your PC only the FAT32 would show up. Just incase

Cheers,

lieb39