Formatting External HD for Mac/Windows

B

bmigga

Member
I'm in an IT class at school and it's required to have an external HD of at least 500GB. I'm going ahead and purchasing a 1TB for future use as well. He mentioned we'll be copying files about 20 to 50 GB at a time, and on campus we're using Windows 7 machines.

I have a MBA (2013) at home which I will need to work on these files with. Currently, I do not have an extra PC at home that I could use.

My question is how to format this drive. I have always known in order to share between a MAC and a PC, you use FAT32. But now that I read more about it, it seems as though there is a 4GB limit for files on the formatting system.

Any advice on how to format this drive? I would really prefer to not have to reformat it every time I go home to work on it.

Thanks guys,
P.S. Please no MAC bashing. That's not what i'm asking about.
 
Format the drive as exFAT. It's supported by mac and Windows and doesn't have a 4gb limit.
 
voyagerfan99 said:
Format the drive as exFAT. It's supported by mac and Windows and doesn't have a 4gb limit.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the response. This may be a silly question, but can I reformat ANY external drive that I buy? The reason I'm asking is because there is a site that comes with the drive already formatted with HFS (to benefit Mac users). Then there are others that come with the drive formatted (i'm assuming) out of the box with NTFS.

If my question was blurred, here it is laid out: Which drive mentioned above should I buy? I'll post links below if there is still some confusion.

http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Port...qid=1377118727&sr=8-1&keywords=wd+my+passport

http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Port...1377118777&sr=8-1&keywords=wd+my+passport+mac
 
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