External hard drive for mac / windows

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1

Just got a WD My Passport Ultra 1tb external harddrive. I will be using it mostly with my mac, however a friend with a PC has some music she’d like to give me. Do I need to format the HD with a third party software?

Some googling shows me PC uses the NTFS file system and mac uses HFS. I will be using it for my computer 99.9% of the time but want to get these beats from this grrrl. Any disadvantages/how do I use the FAT32 format to use both?

If it matters this is on a few year old macbook so I don’t have USB 3.0

2

I’d just use Google drive or whatever to do the transfer and leave it formatted for mac. This is how we handle transferring files in between at school; easiest way we found.

3

Mac can read/write FAT formatted drives.
Mac can read but not write to NTFS formatted drives.
Mac natively uses HFS+.
In a cross platform situation I suggest FAT formatting unless you have individual files larger than 4gb.

4

Just use FAT32

5

What if he has porn rips bigger than 4gb each? I don’t always rip porno flicks, but when I do it’s at 4k resolution.

6

Correction format using “ExFat” since fat32 doesn’t support large HD’s or large files.

Window XP Sp2 and higher and Mac OS 10.6.5 or higher support it.

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In Mavericks (should be there in older versions too) go to Disk Utility and select your HD and goto Erase tab and select the type as exFat