HELP!: How to read and write to External hard drives? What file system to use?

hey all, this has been really frustrating for me today. i want to be able to write to an external HDD that's formatted in NTFS. today i find out it isn't possible to write to this file system on a Mac and that on FAT32 it is possible. however, FAT32 can't address files larger than 4GB so this hurts me a lot. are there any other file systems that'll allow me to read and write from a Mac? my goal was to use freeNAS to build a NAS with an old tower and connect my external hard drives to it, but if i can't write to them this may not be possible.
thanks guys, i'd appreciate any help!

Read this, you don't need to install any software unless you have no choice.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3044
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

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Read and write on external hard drive

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I have read a lot of things on the internet about Macfusion, but since I am new to Mac and not much of a computer-person, can someone give me like a step-by-step guide of how to handle this problem?
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Drives used for Windows have NTFS partitions and MBR (master boot record) disk format.
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You will need to reformat the harddrive to GUID/HFS+ which would delete all information on it. Or buy some software that allows Mac to write to NTFS like NTFS-3G.

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I have backed up my disk using Time Machine. Now I want to delete the backed-up files from my hard drive. But when I do and reconnect the external hard drive, the files are also deleted on that. What do I do?

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This article describes moving your music to another drive, it may be of some help: iTunes for Windows - Moving your iTunes Music Folder

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I'm looking to buy an external hard drive, maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I'm thinking about getting a RAID1 setup. I have a lot of valuable pictures in I-Photo, a lot of music in I-Tunes, and would not be a happy camper if my internal HD fails.
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My Books have had far less than glowing reviews for Macs...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2191614&tstart=0
http://x704.net/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3219&p=42023&hilit=western+digital#p420 23
http://x704.net/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2939&p=34120&hilit=western+digital#p3412 0
If you try LaCie then have a few spare Power Supplies on hand.
I'd stay away from Bus Powered drives & 2.5" drives also, here's some choices, I'd go Firewire & drives with a 5 year warranty over 3 year warranty...
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10618536&#10618536
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Help needed. I have a 3TB external hard drive partitioned into 1TB's. I used one partition as backup for the main computer hard drive. But now it is greyed out as shown in the disk utility and its name changed, i dont know how that happened, i tried verif

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How do I change permissions from read only on my external hard drive?

I'm a new convert from PC to MAC and I'm kicking myself because it's been **** ever since.
My music and business documents are all kept on an external hard drive and that hard drive is NTSF.
My MacBook is reading the whole drive as read only. I'm trying to add my huge library to the cloud but it's not reading it all.
How can I convert the drive to FAT without losing everything. I have 91 gigs of music that as a dance teacher, cannot afford to lose.
Please help!

chombitafeya wrote:
If I'm only using Mac now, do I still follow #2 from above?
If you are going to use the external drive only with Macs now, you can consider the option to format the external drive with "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". In this case, only Macs will read the external drive, but compatibility will be better.
chombitafeya wrote:
If I go out and buy an external hard drive that's Mac compatible, will I still be able to transfer the files from my NTSF drive to the new Mac compatible drive or do I have to use a pc to solve this problem?
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I perviously transfered all my iTunes music to an external hard drive. But now when I connect the external hard drive and try to play a song, I get an error message saying that I need to "locate" my music. I don't how to find it on my external hard drive.

I perviously transfered all my iTunes music to an external hard drive. But now when I connect the external hard drive and try to play a song, I get an error message saying that I need to "locate" my music. I don't how to find it on my external hard drive. Please help for I am not that computer savy and don't want to mess anything up.
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I called Apple Support and they walked me through it. They told me to basically copy and paste my music to the external hard drive. (I think.) Or maybe it was they had me transfer a folder to the EHD. I don't exactally remember it was a few years back. But I tried to plug in the EHD before starting and...nothing. Still says same thing, "locate file."

HELP!: How to read and write to External hard drives? What file system to use?

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