Question about Mac & external hard drives

[Hacker]

Apologies for what may seem like a dumb question but I can be a complete compuer numpty. I'm still considering a Mac and the majority of my images are on 500gb external drives hooked up to my Windows machine, will I be able to read/edit them from the Mac?

Thanks.

 

[Grendel]

You will Colin

A mac can read a windows formatted drive but a PC can't read a MAC formatted drive.

If it is NTFS formatted then the MAC can see the info on there and copy it off (ie read only). If it's FAT32 formatted you can read and write to it

HTH

 

[Hacker]

Great stuff Paul! Much appreciated.

 

[HIMUPNORTH]

Not bought that Mac yet Colin?! Do you take as long with a car? or are you still on a horse?

Just did my first AV presentation with soundtrack made on garageband - yet another reason for a Mac!

 

[andrewc]

You can install 3rd party software to enable NTFS writing support - www.ntfs-3g.org

 

[stephenb]

I recently bought a Western Digital Passport HDD and it works faultlessly when connected to either my macbook or pc and it worked straight out of the box with no need for formatting or new software.