Yes, what you can , and what you SHOULD do are 2 diff. things.
A: hard drives are cheaper than dirt, buy another
B: youre trying, in error, what a LOT of people do, which is create a fatal SINGLE choke point of data loss disaster by lumping everything into ONE HD, which will, without question fail at some point. Just dont do it.
~~~~I would like to use the remaining space for two things: backup and storage
bad, bad, and worse idea, dont do it. Lots do that, most all end up regretting it.
Never let yourself pile your data into a single external backup, most people fall under the false belief that data ON the computer and one copy OFF the computer is 2 copies, but thats never to be considered the case, 2 minimum copies externally, period.
computers are worthless, data is priceless, ......external HD are cheap as dirt, $100 for a nice 2TB ext. 2.5" HD.
"forget" the current HD you have in NTFS, keep it with its computer, or transfer over some of that data to your Mac as you need it.
secondly, get 2 more HD, one for your TM backups, and another for data archive redundancies to put in a firebox or safe, or etc.
Losing months or years of priceless data over $150 worth of hard drives is pure senseless.
You paid $1000+ plus for a computer to save / create/ etc. data...... spend at least $150 on a couple more HD to protect that data.
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection
The Tragedy that will be, the tragedy that never should be
Always presume correctly that your data is priceless and takes a very long time to create and often is irreplaceable. Always presume accurately that hard drives are extremely cheap, and you have no excuse not to have multiple redundant copies of your data copied on hard drives and squirreled away several places, lockboxes, safes, fireboxes, offsite and otherwise.
Hard drives aren't prone to failure…hard drives are guaranteed to fail (the very same is true of SSD). Hard drives dont die when aged, hard drives die at any age, and peak in death when young and slowly increase in risk as they age.
Never practice at any time for any reason the false premise and unreal sense of security in thinking your data is safe on any single external hard drive. This is never the case and has proven to be the single most common horrible tragedy of data loss that exists.
Many 100s of millions of hours of lost work and data are lost each year due to this single common false security. This is an unnatural disaster that can avoid by making all data redundant and then redundant again. If you let a $60 additional redundant hard drive and 3 hours of copying stand between you and years of work, then you've made a fundamental mistake countless 1000s of people each year have come to regret.
