Living with Windows: sharing drives

Swap a USB Hard Drive

Macs and PCs both have USB ports to which you can connect a removable hard drive. The only sticky issue is formatting.

If the drive is formatted for the Mac (using HFS Extended or a variant), Windows won't recognize it. You can fix that by installing Mediafour's $50 MacDrive 8 on the Windows system; it enables Windows to use a Mac-formatted drive natively.

If the hard drive is formatted in the Windows NTSF format, it will mount on the desktop when you plug it into the Mac, but you won't be able to copy files to it. OS X can read NTFS drives, but it can't write to them. You can fix this by installing Paragon Software's $32 NTSF for Mac OS X. If you'd prefer to save money--and if you're adventurous--you can try two free programs: NTFS-3G for Mac OS X and MacFuse, which must be installed together.

There is a third format that both Mac OS X and Windows can read and write to natively: FAT32. It's also the format that most USB flash drives use. FAT32 has some limitations: It can't store files bigger than 4GB, you can't boot a Mac from it, and it's slow. If you want to use FAT32 on a shared USB drive, use Mac OS X's Disk Utility to erase and reformat a hard drive in what Disk Utility calls MS-DOS (FAT).