What's a good portable hard drive to go between Mac and PC?

December 4, 2006 7:32 PM

What is a good mac- and PC-compatible portable hard drive?

I'm looking for a portable hard drive (doesn't have to be any bigger than 40 or 50G) to transfer files to and from work. At work I'm almost exclusively on a PC, but at home I have a Mac. Is there a hard drive out there that won't give me big cross-platform headaches?

posted by estelahe to Technology (8 answers total)

It's not about the disk, it's about the filesystem.

All you need to do is to partition and format using the FAT32 filesystem, which both Win and Mac will read without qualm. The downside is that you will not be able to store files larger than 4Gb. If this is a big problem for you you may want to investigate getting this driver for the windows machine, and this for the mac (which will allow them to each read and write ext2) and using ext2. I've used the windows one with no problems, but have never tried the mac one.

Apart from that, a disk is a disk is a disk. I like Seagates.
posted by pompomtom at 7:53 PM on December 4, 2006

Like pompomtom said, its not the hard drive.

Buy an external enclosure either for a 2.5" or 3.5" hard drive (depending on how portable you want it) and buy your own drive.
posted by mphuie at 7:58 PM on December 4, 2006

I just got a new LACIE disk with my (new! sorry I am totally enamored) mac. Seems like it is the best out there for large dataset storage and easy access. But in your case you might want to look at their Mobile or the Multimedia disks which you will find under products. Their support staff is really helpful and knowledgeable (if they tolerated someone like me...)
posted by carmina at 8:34 PM on December 4, 2006

For what it's worth, I just recently got a 160 GB LaCie firewire drive on eBay for about 80 bucks. Works sweetly. As aforementioned, it's all about formatting.
posted by deep_sea_diving_suit at 8:41 PM on December 4, 2006

What about using a Windows-formatted iPod video (60GB)?
posted by jim.christian at 9:32 PM on December 4, 2006

Also recommend Seagate, in particular the Seagate Portable External Hard Drive, small tidy and robust, also doesn't need external power source, just uses two usb connections. Sizes from 40 to 160GB
posted by clarkie666 at 10:16 PM on December 4, 2006

Mac OS X can read NTFS, but not write to it. Keep that in mind.

FAT32 won't have that problem.
posted by drstein at 10:29 PM on December 4, 2006

One tip: if you're still on OSX 10.3, make sure you unmount before putting the computer to sleep or shutting it off lest you corrupt the drive on restart. The problem is supposedly fixed as of 10.3.1, but it burned me just a couple of weeks ago.
posted by yerfatma at 5:59 AM on December 5, 2006