PC & Mac??

OK, this question will be very basic to some, but I have never touched a mac. So the question. If I buy a 1T external (USB or Firewire, matters not to me) And I put things on it with my PC, can a mac read and write to the drive also? I assume they use different file systems, is there a compatible file system I can format the drive with to accommodate both?

 

The two main filesystems are FAT and NTFS. If you format the external drive as FAT you should have no problems. If you format it NTFS, the mac may still be able to read/write to it with a few modifications, but it's not worth the hassle.

 

Thanks Senlis, In my googling I see that FAT & FAT32 can be read or write with both, but if formated in NTFS can only read on the mac. Is this correct? I don't care about writing with the mac, in fact prefer they couldn't, but to be safe I should go with FAT32?

 

To cut out a lot of work you can go with FAT32. The only benefits that NTFS has that I can remember are compression and permissions.

 

Thanks for your knowledge Senlis.