I just bought an external harddrive. Please help!

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Level 1

11 points

I just bought an external harddrive. Please help!

It's a Seagate Backup plus. USB 3.0 Drive.

Right now it's formatted to NTFS but it comes (or I just had to download) an app called NTFS_for_Mac_with_restart which they say allows me to to write NTFS on a Mac.

Do you think installing this software and leaving the drive in NTFS is a better solution than reformatting the drive to Exfat?

I need to have a drive readable and writable to both Mac and windows 7

I just don't want to screw this up.

Thanks

iPod classic

Posted on Jul 2, 2013 6:47 PM

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Answer 1

rkaufmann87

Level 10

140,706 points

Jul 2, 2013 7:13 PM in response to scofal

Forget the software that came with it, format the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Connect it to your iMac, open Disk Utility and format the drive. If you need a drive for Windows 7 EHD then get another drive. Sharing a drive with Windows and OS X is a losing proposition paticularly if it's a backup drive. The reason it's not a good idea is it's full of compromises such as file sizes, partitioning issues, reliability etc.

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