The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Best Max/Windows External Harddrive

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by diver110, Oct 13, 2014.

  1. diver110

    diver110 Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    1
    Messages:
    399
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    31
    What is the best harddrive that can be used interchangably both for IOS and Windows? Both are loaded on my MBP.
     
    diver110, Oct 13, 2014
    #1
  2. Jarhead

    Jarhead 恋の♡アカサタナ

    Reputations:
    5,036
    Messages:
    12,168
    Likes Received:
    3,134
    Trophy Points:
    681
    iOS? You mean OSX, correct?

    Anyway, what sort of capacity are you looking for?
     
    Jarhead, Oct 13, 2014
    #2
  3. diver110

    diver110 Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    1
    Messages:
    399
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    31
    Good grief, yes OSX. Brain malfunction. 500 gig to 1 T should do it.
     
    diver110, Oct 13, 2014
    #3
  4. KCETech1

    KCETech1 Notebook Prophet

    Reputations:
    2,527
    Messages:
    4,112
    Likes Received:
    449
    Trophy Points:
    151
    I use WD or Seagate externals formatted as EXFAT to run between machines all the time.
     
    KCETech1, Oct 13, 2014
    #4
  5. tijo

    tijo Sacred Blame

    Reputations:
    7,588
    Messages:
    10,023
    Likes Received:
    1,077
    Trophy Points:
    581
    exfat is your best bet. OS X can read NTFS, but can't write to it and FAT 32 won't allow for files > 4 GB.
     
    tijo, Oct 13, 2014
    #5
    Illustrator76 likes this.
  6. saturnotaku

    saturnotaku Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    4,879
    Messages:
    8,926
    Likes Received:
    4,707
    Trophy Points:
    431
    Any external hard drive formatted with the exFAT file system will be fine. You would need to do the formatting yourself as most drives come out of the box as either FAT32 or NTFS.
     
    saturnotaku, Oct 14, 2014
    #6
  7. kais91

    kais91 Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    32
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    11
    Trophy Points:
    31
    You can just get a 1tb western digital my passport and format it as ntfs and use tuxera ntfs to use it with both os. The program allows write operation to ntfs on Mac. You could also format as os x journaled and there are programs that allow r/w to hfs on windows.
     
    kais91, Nov 2, 2014
    #7
  8. mmoy

    mmoy Notebook Deity

    Reputations:
    144
    Messages:
    775
    Likes Received:
    6
    Trophy Points:
    31
    I have a pair of 1TB WD MyBooks (USB, Firewire, SATA) that I use as utility drives with Windows and OSX systems. They're several years old now - I'm pretty sure that the sizes are a lot bigger today. I generally prefer WD drives to other brands.
     
    mmoy, Nov 2, 2014
    #8