[tws]

folks,

i've just received my new macbook pro 17" 2.33 laptop.

I've also purchased an external 500 GB OWC mercury elite pro drive.

i'd like to format this drive so both my PC and mac and access it and read/write to all the data files.

i understand that i can purchase additional software et. al. MacDrive which would allow putting the hard drive on either system without having to reformat or re-initialize the volume.

but i would rather not do that.

should i format the drive as FAT 32 using the PC?

can i then hook up the apple with the firewire 800 and read all my data files placed on the drive from my PC?

thanks for any clarification.

tws

[littlegreenspud]

Yes, your Mac can happily read/write FAT 32.

[mduell]

HFS+: Macs can read/write for free (software included), PCs can read/write with additional (non-free) software
FAT32: Macs and PCs can read/write for free (software included on both), but 4GB filesize limit
NTFS: Macs and PCs can read/write for free (needs free software on Macs, included on PCs).

But those comments only apply when you're directly connecting the drive to a computer through FW or USB.
If you connect the drive to the Mac, you can access it with the PC over the network regardless of how the drive is formatted (using SMB/Samba).

[brother337]

Do you know if there is a slight performance hit for the mac when reading a PC formatted drive (as opposed to a native mac partition.)

[brother337]

On a related note, when I've known that I was going to share an external drive between a Mac and PC, I've made sure that I got the combo USB/firewire version because many times the firewire connection just doesn't play nice on the PC, and USB usually does.

[C.A.T.S. CEO]

Originally Posted by brother337 

Do you know if there is a slight performance hit for the mac when reading a PC formatted drive (as opposed to a native mac partition.)

I don't believe there is

[tws]

thanks for your help...

i've just now formatted my 500GB drive and yes it comes with usb2 (connected now to my P4 asus downloading all my data files) and it is equiped with a 400 and 800 firewire connects.

i had to have help formatting the external drive... as it turned out i could not *easily* do it in windows xp pro but rather had to download a third party freeware/trial program and it formated the drive lickety split!

kewl... only problem is now i'll probably have to wait all day for it to copy my files (160gigs) to the drive...

I'd like to ask another question...

i have gotten my new macbook pro out of the box and have been reading a thread on apple discussions about switching to a mac from a pc...

Apple - Support - Discussions - PC user about to buy a MacBookPro ...

it's an interesting thread covering two important issues for me... one is zeroing the drive and doing a re-installation of the OS X...

the other issue involves setting up an admin user acct. here is a quote from the thread"

"I was also told a great security tip by a UNIX expert.
when you create your very first account.. call it admin or something, and make it an account that you will never log in from. once it's done and you're logged in, go straight to accounts in system prefs and create a new one, this time call it whatever you want your 'real' user account to be called. make it an admin level account as well. then, I think you can set it up so that you automatically log in to this account, or if not, every time you start your machine, just always log in to this second account as your user account.
the reason for this is that the first user account created in a mac OSX system always has a known UNIX ID. so, even though macs do not announce their presence on networks as obviously as PCs do, any hacker that might be doing a random search for a system in a network might know this UNIX ID and will be able to find your system, if it is logged in to this first account. so, if you've created it, but it's dormant cos you never log into it, you will have an extra level of security for your system. plus, you have the additional advantage of having a spare user account already created that you can log into, in case your system ever becomes corrupted and you need to be able to access the machine. this happens.. it has happened to me twice since I've been using OSX."


i would like to set this up but having never used an apple before i'm a bit daunted. if anyone can provide a step by step proceedure i'd sure be obliged...

thanks again for your prompt and helpful feed back.

tws