What to format an external hard drive to

Question

I have a imac, terrabyte drive and all that... however, I also have another external 1.5 terrabyte that I've not used before.
If I want to use this drive between windows and a mac so it works on both basically...do I format the drive through fusion on my mac and format it as a fat32? fat 32 works on both mac and windows does it not? where as using macs format method will only allow the drive to be seen by a mac and if formatting it with ntfs I will be able to see it in a mac but not write to it from a mac?
Is this correct?

Answer 1

Jogon wrote:
I have a imac, terrabyte drive and all that... however, I also have another external 1.5 terrabyte that I've not used before.
If I want to use this drive between windows and a mac so it works on both basically...do I format the drive through fusion on my mac and format it as a fat32? fat 32 works on both mac and windows does it not?
Yes, mostly. There is a 4 GB limit on the size of individual files, so if that's a problem, you'll need something else.
I don't do Windoze, but understand there are 3rd-party utilities for it that will handle HFS+ volumes.
If you want to use that drive for other things, such as backups, you can partition it, with different formats for different partitions. I'd recommend using the GUID *Partition Map Scheme* in any event.
And you can use +Disk Utility+ (in your Applications/Utilities folder) for this.