I’m looking for an external USB hard drive that is compatible with Mac, PC, and Linux. Any ideas?

August 20, 2010 in usb external hard drive | Comments (2)

I actually use Mac, PC, and Linux and need an external hard drive that works with all three. I’m not sure what hard drives or file systems will work. Any thoughts? Thank you!

All hard disk drives and enclosures are compatible. The standard FAT32 formatting should work on all three operating platforms. Some come with NTFS, though. Recent Linux distributions can safely write NTFS volumes, but older ones can not. Not sure about OSX, but it’s probably compatible. If you need FAT32, you CAN create huge volumes (read: bigger than 32GB) with it. Just use a third-part partitioner like Gparted, instead of Windows’s crippled one.

2 Responses to “I’m looking for an external USB hard drive that is compatible with Mac, PC, and Linux. Any ideas?”

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  1. Comment by manimal347@rocketmail.com — August 20, 2010 at 9:50 am  

    All hard disk drives and enclosures are compatible. The standard FAT32 formatting should work on all three operating platforms. Some come with NTFS, though. Recent Linux distributions can safely write NTFS volumes, but older ones can not. Not sure about OSX, but it’s probably compatible. If you need FAT32, you CAN create huge volumes (read: bigger than 32GB) with it. Just use a third-part partitioner like Gparted, instead of Windows’s crippled one.
    References :

  2. Comment by jerry t — August 20, 2010 at 10:04 am  

    This first link is 1 vendor that claims compatibility among all 3 OSes. Check the FAQs question no.5.
    However there is a lot of controversy and confusion over how well this 3 way compatibility works, and a lot of disclaimers and precautions by those who propose it.
    Here are two more links to get a flavor of the discussion. If you google mac +linux +pc +compatibility (or some combination of them) you will get all sorts of opinions and people with problems.
    It seems that it is vitally important which computer formats the partition for this to work well, and I do not know the answer to that.
    It will also make a big difference the types of data that you want to share (simple text files, word .docs, photos, video,).
    Have you considered setting up a website to share these files?
    Good luck
    References :
    http://www.pocketec.net/BackupHardDrive.html

    http://techqa.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/can-mac-read-and-write-to-ntfs-drives/
    http://www.pcuser.com.au/pcuser/hs2.nsf/lookup+1/EF108F9C9C4CC6DFCA256E84003F57A7

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