I have a 40G external hard drive that I use to store
Mp3s. When visiting friends, I will often bring the
hard drive along to share new music with them. It
can conveniently be hooked up to their computer.
However, I now use a MAC and very few of my friends
are using MACs. Thus, is it ok to be using this hard
drive on both PC and MAC? For example, I heard that
swapping a zip drive back and forth will eventually
cause the zip disk to become unstable. Will the same
happen to this hard drive? Or will both computers be
able to read the drive's contents without
complications? Additionally, I have yet to save an
Mp3 on this drive using my MAC. (So far, all the
music has been written to the hard drive via my PC.) If I do
write an Mp3 to the drive via the MAC, will my PC be
able to read it?

Thanks in advance,
snowak

the drive format for mac and pc are not the same, one cannot read the other format. Mac can read pc floppy and cd OK but not the pc hard drive.

Well, it depends. The drive is most likely FAT32
which is supported by wintel and the latest versions
of Mac OS X. It works fine but should you ever need
to recover the disc (corruption) music files take the
brunt of it and 70% of the time are unreadable. Also,
FAT32 on Mac is generally slower (crappier format
anyway). But seeing as it's just a 40gb and sharing
mp3s anyway ;) I wouldn't worry about it.

James

yeah, the mac should read it, and mp3's are just mp3's regardless of the format, same as mpeg and avi videos and graphics formats (quicktime format isn't quite so straightforward)..i've mp3's from my pc to mac , never had a problem reading them after...but havent tried reading mp3's transferred from my mac to pc, so don't know there (should work tho)

it is NOT the files format, it has to do with the hard drive format for File Allocation Table (FAT) for MAC and PC. If you hook up the MAC format drive to PC it will not even show up in the Windows because of the format setup.

If you format on a Mac in a dos extende format, which mac os 9.2 and os x both have your hard drive can be shared and read on both type of machines. however formating on a pc you have to format in fat, then both can read you can not format in ntfs, mac will not reat ntfs. on music and videos mp3, avi's, mpeg all read the same on both machines there is a quicktime for both os's and there is even a windows media player avalible for macs. mp3's can be read on iTune or Winamp on both macines. Graphic formats are a little different if you save a file on a pc a mac can read it and change it using programs like photoshop, or illustator but if you save it on a mac pc can not read it unless you save it on the mac as a pc file which you can do through macs, and photoshop and illustrator. also you can save a eps or pdf which can be read on both machines using a program which reads eps's or using acrobat for pdf's. now i hope you are happy with this explanation which i know is a little lengthy but enjoy i work on pc's and mac's and between the two and have an external harddrive (a 120GB) that i share between the two. i'm a graphic designer. i know about mac and pc i use them both.