Hi there, I have The following pieces of hardware: HP dx6100 Win XP Pro SP3 PC 512 RAM Intel 2.86Ghz Centrino 80GB HD Seagate Free Agent Pro 1TB external Hard Drive Mac Book OS 10.5.5 Core Duo 2GHz 2Gb ram .. and about 350gb worth of photos, video & music. I would like to use the HP PC as a home media Server. I have rebuilt it, partitioned the C drive to NTFS - 5 Gb and installed XP Pro SP3. With divers & updates etc.. there is just under 1Gb of free space on C drive. I have a second Primary Partition as FAT32 - 5Gg with itunes, Quicktime & WAMP installed (i'm experiementing with wordpress & Expression Engine as well). The reason I chose fat32 for this drive was that I wanted to be able to read / write the itunes database from my Mac (eg, add album cover art etc... from the mac). I have around 60GB of unpartitioned HD space on the Hp PC, plus a 1TB External HD currently formatted as NTFS, full of media. I want to be able to share this media across my home network. So my questions are: 1. Have I formatted the PC in a logical way so far? 2. What format should my External HD be? 3. What is the best method for sharing these files - by sharing the folder permissions? 4. Should I turn the PC into a linux box instead? What would be the pros & cons of this? My understanding so far is: FAT32 is less secure, and can only be formatted to 32Gb. NTFS can only be read, not written to from Mac. I can't format a partitioned HD as OS Journaled Extended (which i understand is the standard mac Format). You can probably tell I'm a bit of a novice at this, so would appreciate anyone's thoughts -thanks! Tim

You are seriously ill-informed about FAT32 FAT32 is actually superior to NTFS in many way, for the technical user wise. FAT32 is a "dumb" file system in that it does not have the useless security features of NTFS(all of which have not worked for years because of the many tools available) and it does not have the serious overhead problem that NTFS has. FAT32 has no real limit, the file size just goes up with the amount of space you allow FAT32 to allocate to a partition and therefore FAT32 is far less efficient(but faster) than NTFS. Considering all the security features of NTFS have not worked in some time, they actually work against the user especially when one is infected with a virus. The virus can change all the permissions for every file and lock you out of your own drive, Thanks NTFS! With FAT32 fixing the issue is as simple as rebooting, popping in a 98se CD, booting and running your favorite DOS based anti-virus. Something that is impossible with NTFS. FAT32 does have a file size limit of 4.5, or 4.7gb's I think, NTFS does not have a file size limit. This and smaller block sizes are NTFS's only advantages. I myself run my primary 60gb drive with FAT32 for ease of use, repair, and speed. I run my data drive with NTFS because I store larger files than 4.7gb's. File systems also have nothing to do with sending files to a server. The server translates all the data you send to it and places it where it needs to go. The only reason you need to format something in FAT32 is if you are going to hook the drive out to the mac. I was around in the tech field when I saw th birth of NTFS and how bad it was back then. Over the years it really hasn't improved much. At least no one randomly loses all their files anymore, That was huge flaw when NTFS came out. Why do you think MS is replacing it with WinFS? Because NTFS sucks! Core 2 Duo 1.86 2GB DDR 667 ASUS P5L-MX Nvidia 8500GT 500/1000

"FAT32 is a "dumb" file system in that it does not have the useless security features of NTFS(all of which have not worked for years because of the many tools available) and it does not have the serious overhead problem that NTFS has." Uhh.. what? Seriously, are you an idiot? Medion MIM 2080 Toshiba T2130CT Macintosh Performa 450 All working wonderfully.

stick with NTFS, and download the NTFS driver for mac NTFS-3G