So for college this year i'm going into Digital Cinema, and at NMU (where i'm going) you are automatically supplied with a free laptop. For Art/Design students such as myself you get an IBook, everyone else just gets an HP w/ Windows. Well at home i just have Windows XP, but need an external hardrive to store all my music/pictures/videos/etc. so i can transfer them to my new laptop. Would you guys trust this? 60GB would do me just fine, but would that work for transferring from Windows to Mac? Feedback couldnt get much better,so im just wondering about hte functionability.

 

It should work just fine, just make sure you unmount the drive from the Mac each and every time you unplug. I've had bad things happen otherwise.

Do you plan to use the drive to transfer files often? If not, borrow a buddy's 30gig iPod and do it that way. I really don't like external hard drives for storage because they DO go bad and it always seems to be with irreplaceable files or right at the worst possible time. They also sometimes don't appreciate being schlepped around. We use DVDs for the backup at work and they work fine, you just have to keep them protected.

With large media files it would probably come in handy, though.

 

naw not often, mostly just to have them backed up, i'm gonna transfer all the music over, but other than that i dont think i'll use it much.

Do the ygo bad often? I dont really wanna lose all my pictures n music n stuff....

 

If you are going to get an external hard drive, I would recommend getting an external hard drive enclosure and using a regular IDE hard drive. The enclosures are good for several purposes. You can use it as an external hard drive but you can also use it to extract data from a computer that has a nasty virus on it. Also, you can throw in any hard drive you have instead.

 

Any external USB drive shoud work just fine for transferring files. It'll just show up as a removable drive on both operating systems. You should just be able open it like any other drive and peruse the files on either one.

The enclosures he mentioned are pretty nice as well, you can get them cheap and, if you're like me, use and hard drive you happen to have sitting around. You gotta be careful tho, I've been sold some bunk enclosures on ebay tho. Some of them are really cheap and crappy, just like ebay car stuff.

BTW that isn't an actual Seagate portable drive. It's just a laptop Seagate drive in one of those shoddy enclosure I just mentioned.

 

well the guys feedback is just about perfect (99.9% positive) so i think i dont think it'll be shoddy, i think i'll try it and back everything up on DVDs as well (thanks for hte idea shellbelle). thanks guys

 

Oh haha another BTW Macs can read NTFS formateed drives but only in OSX and they can only READ not write. You have to get some hacked drivers in order to write to it. You can format it in FAT32 and have Windows and Macs read it but you wont be able to put any file larger than 4gb on it.

I don't have much experience with Macs so I'm looking this stuff up as I go along. :B

 

that ****s beyond me.....i got no experience with Macs AT ALL, so we'll see how this goes.....well i guess i just need to know if i'll be able to copy all my music to my Mac off of the external hardrive

 

From what I've read, without any tweaking, you should be able to tranfer files from the Windows PC to the Mac on, but you won't be able to put any files from the Mac onto the hard drive.

I have no experience with macs either, just what I've read on some forums. I know with Boot Party for OSX you can dual boot Windows and Mac OSX and switch between them.

 

alright, i'm not too worried about trasnferring files off the Mac since it will be my main computer anyway, thanks alot