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I am going to buy a Western Digital My Book 500GB Essential USB2.0 External Hard Drive. I am not sure what the file system is. At the moment i am using a PC though in a few months i will be using both a Mac and a PC thus what would be a compatible file system which doesnt cause partitions. I heard that Fat 32 is only capable of 32gb though i am not sure.

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2007-03-20 08:28:06 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet Hardware Other - Hardware

I will be mainly using the hard drive for music and video files which are about 350mb compressed 45mins long in divx format

2007-03-20 08:39:31 · update #1

4 answers

no ... fat32 is only capable of handling files up to 4gb size ... if u handle large video files its not ideal ... but if u want to switch between mac and pc u MUST use fat32 .. there is no 32gb limit u can format the whole 500gb drive in fat32 if ur bios is uptodate ..

2007-03-20 08:32:41 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1 0

Watch out. You are getting some really bad answers here. Let me tell you the real truth.

Mac can format to Mac Extended file system, Unix File System (UFS) or DOS FAT32. Only the latter is seen by a Windows box.

Windows can format NTFS or DOS FAT32. Only the latter can be written to by a MAC OS X system. Your only cross-platform choice for read-write is FAT32.

Windows formatting software can only make FAT32 partitions up to 32 GB size but some third party software, such as Swiss Knife, can make huge FAT32 partitions. Get it from the link below.

2007-03-24 05:42:47 · answer #2 · answered by SilverTonguedDevil 7 · 0 0

I see this is a 9 year old question. In the tech world improvements are made constantly so you do NOT want to go by 9 year old answers!
Today I'd look at using either exFAT or UDF as your file system.
exFAT is the standard used on the new SDXC cards.
UDF was developed for CD/DVDs, but has since been tweaked for use with removables.
Either should work.
I found the most up-to-date discussion here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/27936/can-and-should-udf-be-used-as-a-hard-drive-format

2015-11-29 11:14:04 · answer #3 · answered by jburdman7 2 · 0 0

Hard Drives can be formatted to work on either MAC or PC.

So any one you buy will work fine.

2007-03-20 08:33:13 · answer #4 · answered by phrozen_wolf 2 · 0 0

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