[berndawg84]

Mac's do not read NTFS. Trust me I have become a little bit of an expert on the hard drive issue after recently buying a Mac. I had a 400 GB external HD Formatted NTFS for my previous Windows laptop. On a Mac you can only read NTFS, not write (so no copying to the HD or renaming or moving files). So I had to unload everything off the HD, about 350 gigs of stuff (including many torrents) to other computers and HDs, then I formatted the external HD as HFS+ to work on a Mac. I also created a 15 gig FAT32 partition in case I ever hook up the HD to a Windows computer again.

They say that FAT32 is slow, and that if you have a huge HD it's better not to format it that way. I would say forget that. If you're going to use the HD on PC and Mac, your best bet is to format FAT32. But do this on a Mac, as on PCs there is a cluster size limit. As stated, you can also buy MacDrive for $50 and use an HFS drive with Windows. I've heard it works well but haven't tried it myself.

Bottom line: if you want to use both OS, and you don't wanna spend money, format it to FAT32 ON YOUR MAC. Otherwise, format HFS and buy Macdrive for Windows. I have heard though that the HFS file system is faster than FAT32, so that is something to consider. As for the 4 gig file size limit on FAT32, when will that ever be an issue? Even if you have a DVD on your HD, the largest file will be under 2 gigs...