Formatting for both Mac and PC - not using FAT32?

very easy mate ....


use this: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

and format the Hard drive as NT File System.

you can read more here.


regarding the partition, that is merely organization, the disc is the same, the needles work the same way inside the hard drive 🙂 and remember, you will never have 500Gb x 2 available ... a 1Tb hard drive has around 950 Gb available or less.

A disk advertised as 1T should have between 922 MB and 931 MB of space. Disk manufacturers will specify the disk's unformatted capacity in metric bytes. Whereas the operating system reports the capacity in units where 1MB is 2^30 bytes (1073741824 bytes). Then, there's a marginal loss for bad blocks and filesystem overhead.

Disks typically have a few minor imperfections after manufacturing and the drive firmware maintains in the drive itself a "bad blocks" list that maps out where there are physical defects on the disk (and they are transparently skipped over). This does have some very small impact on the actual available storage on the disk as well.

MacFuse with NTFS-ng works very well.

The only benefit to partitioning is as a matter of organization.

One important point to consider is what you will be using the drive for. Just a straight copy of data files, or a fully-functional bootable clone of the system you can use for disaster recovery?

For plain copies, NTFS via MacFUSE is a better choice than FAT32 if you want MacOS X/Windows interoperability, since FAT32 limits the max. size of files to 4GB and gets mixed up if you have too many files.

In the second case, the filesystem must be in MacOS Extended (aka HFS+), since a Mac won't boot from anything else.

Note also that besides the +filesystem format+, you have to worry about the +partitioning scheme+. Windows computers need it to be in Master Boot Record ( MBR) format, whereas Intel Macs require GUID format to boot from.