Windows-formatted drives won’t work with my Mac.
If you need to write to an NTFS-formatted drive from your Mac, experimental therapy is available. Several offshoots of FUSE—an open-source file system porting project -- can help, including OSXFUSE, MacFUSE, and Fuse4X. Before starting with one, check the documentation to ensure it’s compatible with your version of OS X and any software you might be running.
Need to share drives with a PC? Disk Utility has you covered.
To simply create a drive you can read and write to on a Mac and PC, back up any data already on the drive, then open Disk Utility in Applications > Utilities. Select the drive in the sidebar and click the Erase tab. In the Format pull-down menu, choose MS-DOS (FAT) if the drive is under 32GB, or ExFAT if the drive is larger. Name the drive something clever, then click the Erase button to apply the new format. Don’t forget that Windows won’t recognize files larger than 4GB on the drive—a limitation not shared with NTFS-formatted volumes.
Engelsstaub
October 09, 2011 at 6:23pm
Actually Windows (and OS X) will recognize files of any size when the drive is formatted as ExFAT.
FAT 32 is the formatting that has the size-limitation. I have an external HDD that syncs to both a PC and a Macintosh. It's formatted as ExFAT and contains ISO images and MKV files of DVDs larger than 4 Gb. ;)
mrplow
October 07, 2011 at 6:55am
For $20 you can get Paragon NTFS 9 - a fully featured, supported and robust solution that beats any current FUSE solution.
Had too many FUSE data corruption issues to use it anymore.
vterm
October 07, 2011 at 11:58am
I totally agree....
Paragon NTFS works like a charm...worth every cent.
