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I purchased a Airport Extreme Base Station recently and as well have a Western Digital 500MB My Book drive. I will be using it with the base station but it's not formatted and I wondered which way I should format it. Not knowing better since I have a Windows XP machine I formatted it in NTFS and realized later it won't work with this. It seems I need either Fat32 or HFS+.
Which format is best for me to go with? I know if I use Fat32 unlike HFS+ I can use it directly on a WinXP machine but most of the time if not all I will use it through the Airport Base Station and those few times I won't will hook it up directly to my MBP. When I format what is the best way to go about formatting the drive?
Go ahead and set it up as HFS+ (Journaled). I've got the same kind of setup as you, and I formatted my drive as a HFS+, and I can read/write from both the Mac and the PC.
Go ahead and set it up as HFS+ (Journaled). I've got the same kind of setup as you, and I formatted my drive as a HFS+, and I can read/write from both the Mac and the PC.
Yes that will work.
It has to do with the fact that clients don't really read/write directly to/from the disk (since Windows can't do HFS+ out of the box that would be a Mac-only thing anyway). Instead IIRC the AP Extreme uses Samba to share the disk to network clients. So in essence you have to format it only so the AP Extreme can read/write to/from it and then the base station will take care of all disk access regardless of what type of formatting client OSes usually support.
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