I would like to use an external hard disk to share files between windows and macs. This makes FAT32 the obvious choice; however, I do not want the 4GB file size limit imposed by FAT32. Is there another option?
Thank you in advance.
— D Levy
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Share drive between mac and windows
Comments: 5 Responses to “Share drive between mac and windows”
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Try formatting it as NTFS in Windows and see if that works. But FAT32 should give you a 32GB limit, not 4GB. Been a while since I tried this, though.
My macs can't write to an NTFS file system. Also, FAT32 files are limited in size to 2^32 bytes = 4GB.
Do you have an older Mac? Is that why it won't support NTFS? Try a google search for "macs ntfs" and you'll see several possible solutions.
Yes, you are right, there is a 4GB FAT32 file size limit -- I was thinking of drive size.
It sounds like file sharing might be a better option than an external hard disk. Perhaps a file server like the kind HP offers that can be shared between computers on your network.
I have a brand new mac. Apparently, macs have no trouble reading from NTFS; they just can't write to it.
I have read about third party software that allows mac to write to NTFS and was wondering if you or anyone else had any experiences with those solutions.
I will post again if I find something that works. Again, thanks for your time and help.
I could have sworn that the NTFS write issue had been solved with one of the Snow Leopard updates. But I can't find any info on it. I haven't looked into any of the solutions.