How to use a hard drive on both a PC and a Mac

Thu May 29, 2008 4:41PM EDT

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Moving your files from a PC to a Mac? You may find that the job isn't quite so simple, because Macs, out of the box, can't read drives formatted with the NTFS file system, which is the standard for Windows. How do you solve the dilemma of getting hundreds of gigs of data from your Windows PC to your Mac?

While a variety of solutions are possible, the best I've found is to use a simple piece of software called MacFuse. MacFuse is a small and very simple piece of software that lets Macs read NTFS drives (and, in fact, drives formatted with a variety of file systems).

To get it, just drop by the web page linked above, and download the appropriate version for your Mac (10.5 if you have Leopard, 10.4 if you have Tiger). Install the dmg package like you would any software and reboot (optionally). You're done.

Grab that hard drive or any Windows formatted thumbdrive and plug it in. The drive will appear normally on the desktop and can be read or written to as you would any Mac drive. There's no need to launch anything special in order to read the drive. MacFuse is automatic.

One caveat: Writing files to an NTFS drive on a Mac using MacFuse is slow (see the FAQ), so unless you really need to have a drive that both types of computer can access, consider reformatting the drive on your Mac after you've grabbed everything you need from your PC and copied it over.

LINK: MacFuse 

Comments on How to use a hard drive on both a PC and a Mac

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  • 1 Posted by fdpart57 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:59PM EDT Report Abuse

    The easiest that I've found to share a hard drive is to format it in fat32. Both Windows and OSX can read and write to it fine with no additional software. I don't think that I've ever purchased an external hard drive or thumbdrive that wasn't already formatted in fat32 out of the box.

  • 2 Posted by sciencetroll@verizon.net on Thu Sep 3, 2009 9:08PM EDT Report Abuse

    why does apple not just include a driver or whatever to read ntfs. its been out for almost 10 years!

  • 3 Posted by cnull on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:27PM EDT Report Abuse

    fdpart57 - most drives are formatted NTFS now. Vista also has some trouble with FAT 32, and FAT 32 is considered generally less reliable than NTFS... I'd recommend using MacFuse vs. using FAT 32, really.

  • 4 Posted by chas2k3 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:22PM EDT Report Abuse

    This is a question What about the other way MAC to NTFS drive???

  • 5 Posted by lakerslive2004 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:56PM EDT Report Abuse

    macs actually can read NTFS out of the box, just can't write.

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