I have a USB 2.0 hard drive Encloser (250 GB HD) that I was using for my windows pc until I recently got my mac mini intel Duo. I plan on using this for my mac mini, would this be ok to keep all my Itunes music, pictures etc. ? It's formatted in NTFS. Also is it worth it to get a firewire enclosure?
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External Hard Drive
- Thread starter darbsrewop
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You'll have to reformat it because the Mac will not be able to write to NTFS. If you want to continue using it with your PC then format it in Disk Utility as MS-DOS File System, or FAT32 in other words. This'll be fine for keeping your pictures and music on. 
mad jew is spot on. If you want to use it only with your Mac mini, then you will likely want to format it in HFS+, the standard filesystem for Mac hard drives. Otherwise go with FAT32.
Regarding getting a Firewire enclosure: you'd get better performance when using the drive with your Mac, but probably not better enough to warrant the extra cost. USB 2 should work just fine with the mini so my advice would be to stick with what you have.
Regarding getting a Firewire enclosure: you'd get better performance when using the drive with your Mac, but probably not better enough to warrant the extra cost. USB 2 should work just fine with the mini so my advice would be to stick with what you have.
darbsrewop said:
You can read these files in NTFS partition, but you can't change any files in that partition. If you don't want to reformat the hard drive, and want a mac partition on the hard drive, you need to resize the NTFS partition under a DOS program: partition magic, giving another partition. Then under windows, you need to delete this new partition under computer manage. Then use diskpart under DOS to creat a AF partition. Under OSx, you can erase the AF partition to HFS+ mac partition. So you have one NTFS and one mac partition now.