Sharing an external hard drive with a PC

Fancy an Apple? wrote:

Hello. I am still using a 2005 PPC iMac running Tiger. My photos are stored in Aperture and Lightroom 2, however they are all stored on my computer's hard drive. I want to remove them from my computer and store them on an external hard drive instead.

My flat mate has a Windows based PC laptop and also has stuff he wants to store on an external hard drive. We were thinking about going halves and getting a Western Digital 2TB hard drive and sharing it.

I understand that the hard drives can be shared for both formats using FAT32, although I am aware there are file size limits and data corruption is very possible, so I will be avoiding that. I have read that it can also be done using NTFS for a PC and downloading NTFS-3G for use with the Mac so both formats can read and write to the hard drive.

My question is this; how will this affect my Lightroom library? Is it even possible to store a Mac based Lightroom Library on an external hard drive that has PC files on it. Or is it safer to not bother sharing a hard drive and getting individual ones?

If you are so concerned about data corruption that a 25 year old well tried file system is too risky, what makes you think that a relatively untried, free 3rd party addition is even going to be as safe?

Maybe you should rethink this.

Read this forum, problems with NTFS 3G are common, here's my advice, buy 2 drives and use one each, HFS for you NTFS for your flat mate.

I concur with the idea of having two drives and then formatting them for the platform where they will be used. IMHO the idea of using disk between two different platforms is a false economy.

I suggest you check out MacSales for an external hard drive for your Mac. The drives they sell are formatted for Mac.

Allan

And I will second Allan's recomendation to use OWC (www.macsales.com) as a reliable source for the disk.