USB hard drive on the MacBook Pro (any Mac)?

[elbirth]

So with my MBP shipping on its way, I want to make sure I have this situated. This will be my first Mac, so please excuse me if it's not really an issue, etc.

I have a 120GB hard drive in a USB enclosure, and just got a 300GB drive in another one. The 120GB drive is formatted in NTFS and I use it back and forth between my Windows desktop and laptop. I've initialized the 300GB drive and it also got formatted in NTFS. It's my understanding that OSX can really only read NTFS drives but not really write to them (that's been my experience with Linux, at least). Is this correct?

If so, how would I go about using it on my MacBook Pro? I want it mainly to serve as a backup drive for it, as well as a general storage drive. Right now there's nothing on it... so when I get the MBP, can I just plug it up and reformat it to FAT or something? I want to still be able to use it on my Windows machine if possible.

Any advice?

 

[robbieduncan]

You are correct about NTFS: OSX can read but not write.

FAT32 is the way to go. Both OSX and Windows can read-write it fine.

 

[cwedl]

I know Mac OSX can only read not write on the NTFS file system, but when I got my Lacie external it was formated as NTFS. I could read and write on my Mac OSX computer, so later when I reformatted it, I made it NTFS but I could read not write, os I formatted it as FAT32. Weird...


EDIT: what I was trying to say, try it before reformatting.

 

[elbirth]

That sounds great, thanks for the input. I'll give it a try when I first get it, but might reformat it anyway since I'd feel safer knowing that OSX doesn't have issues writing to FAT.