portable HD... windows --> Mac

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pills_PMD

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i need to share a portable hard drive between my MAC and my PC for my research data.

sea gate suggests i format it HFS and find 3rd party software to allow my PC to read/write to the HFS drive.

is there really a problem leaving it FAT32 since windows/linux/mac can all read/write to FAT32?
 
if you have 2 computers, i'm assuming you have a network.
I'd suggest setting up the drive as a NAS.

over a network, file systems are independant.
 
Appletalk is dead for the most part. Just partition it FAT32 and you should not have any problems.
Also for additional compatibility go to the system preferences on your mac and click the sharing icon. Then check to turn on file sharing and Windows file sharing. That will give you the most compatibility on a network as well.
 
Yeah, definitely not a FAT32 limitation. Do the math with the bit counts in the file allocation table and you'll see exactly how many clusters fit into each file system- then multiply by your cluster size to get total capacity.
 
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