External HD Question

[VanillaO]

I am probably one of the most uninformed people when it come to computers, so bear with me.

Can an external hard drive be used with both Windows and Mac computers?

My old external stopped working like 6 months ago, and I got a mac for very cheap (laptop for school) from my buddy. I have a lot of music and stuff on my desktop that I'd like to xfer to my laptop, but I don't have an external right now (and don't plan on spending a few hours doing it 1gb at a time on a flash drive stick thing).

[Deleted]

Yep! That's perfectly possible.

When you purchase your external hard drive, plug it into your windows computer, click My Computer, right click on the new hard drive (the external, NOT your desktop hard drive,) and click format. Format it to FAT32 and it will be compatible with both Windows and Mac. (Quick format is fine.)

The reason you format it to FAT32 is that both Mac and Windows can read and write data to the FAT32 filesystem.
If the external hard drive is in another format like NTFS, chances are one of the operating systems won't have full access to the drive (for example, Windows can read and write on NTFS, but Mac can only read, and not write any data to NTFS.)

Have fun!

[VanillaO]

Thanks for the quick response

[Deleted]

Nehran is right

The only thing about FAT32 is the max file size of 4 GB and a max volume size of 2 TB. Shouldn't be a problem with music though.

Source.